In May of 2021, I was promoted to Full Professor. What follows is my promotion application justification; the work continues.

In May of 2016, I was promoted to Associate Professor for the Fashion Institute of Technology, Gladys Marcus Library. Since that time, I have engaged actively in my profession on every level -- from that of the College to that of an international reach -- and I have enjoyed every opportunity afforded to me.

Just after my promotion to Associate Professor, I was knee-deep in the nearly four million dollar renovation project of the FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC). This renovation resulted in the expansion of the footprint by nearly 100 percent while allowing for 1200 linear feet of empty shelves for strategic growth. It was the culmination of circa five years of work with talented and knowledgeable architects to realize a space that would serve not only current SPARC practitioners but also those future SPARC professionals as well as all who rely on the unit for primary, original research materials. Almost immediately, visitorship increased from an average of 350 per academic year to circa 1300 per year.

While fully engaged in the renovation project, I continued my student research development work including advising Global Fashion Management (GFM) graduate students as they researched their capstone projects. I have guided and lectured GFM students now for eleven years in their pursuit of solid research strategies. I also forged ahead with the SPARC publications program, established under my leadership in 2012, with a new title, Arsho Baghsarian: A Life in Shoes (published in 2019). The raw material for this monograph was the manuscript collection Ms. Baghsarian donated to SPARC some years prior. This book was the third title born completely out of SPARC content. For Arsho, FIT Professor Helene Verin was the author and I wrote the Foreword.

Other publication efforts include my co-authoring a chapter for the monograph entitled, The Fashion Forecasters. In 2016, I co-wrote the chapter with Dr. Véronique Pouillard, Professor in Modern International History, Institute for Archeology, Conservation, and History, University of Oslo. In the chapter, “Tobe Coller Davis: A Career in Fashion Forecasting in America,” we focused on the life, work, and legacy of Tobe Coller Davis, founder of the ground-breaking fashion forecasting series, the Tobe Report (1927-present).

In 2017, I contributed to the Art Libraries Journal with the article, “Historical Holdings and New Dimensions: The Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY Library Unit of Special Collections and College Archives.” In the article, I introduce key SPARC collections to readers and briefly discuss its recent large-scale renovation.

Then, in 2018, I was invited to contribute an article to The Informed Librarian Online, an online journal targeted to 21st century information professionals. In the April issue, SPARC was highlighted as the “Featured Library.” I wrote the accompanying article, “Mission Possible, A Renovation Story: How Years of Planning and Months of Execution Yielded the Environment of Our Dreams,” as an account of the unit generally and its renovation experience specifically.

I also was invited twice, in 2019 and 2020, to contribute articles to Archival Outlook, the bi-monthly magazine of the Society of American Archivists. The first article, entitled, Building Bridges: The Co-Education of Archivists and Architects on Renovation Projects, focused on the challenges and rewards of archivists working with architects in the course of major archives renovation projects. The second article, entitled, A History of Fashioning Unconventional Futures, highlighted FIT’s momentous 75th anniversary and the College Archives used in its commemoration.

The International Journal of Fashion Studies (IJFS) is “an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that fosters the worldwide diffusion of fashion studies.” I am delighted to have my article, “Voices of Fashion Industry Decision-makers: The Oral History Program at the Fashion Institute of Technology-State University of New York” scheduled for publication in the IJFS in early 2021. This article is the result of a paper I presented at a conference in Oslo, Norway in June 2019.

I realized more growth in terms of professional organization involvement and leadership in 2016 when I was elected Vice President/President Elect of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, Inc. This regionally-focused professional organization represents circa 1200 archivists practicing in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. This was a three-year commitment (Vice President/President/Past-President) and was a very rewarding experience, allowing me to hone my leadership skills and serving me well in the near future on both national and international levels.

Over the years, I continued the very successful SPARC Internship Program. Since June 2016, SPARC has engaged thirty-six interns, all of whom bring a magical freshness to our efforts to link researchers to relevant content. The program exposes an area of professional practice to students of relevant disciplines, such as fashion studies, or young professionals in the broader field of information science who might not have considered such a stimulating career path.

I firmly believe that engaging on an international level is critical to solid, informed archival practice given the root of the profession generated in Europe. Since May 2016, I have presented at four international conferences. I have been very fortunate to present papers in Aachen, Germany (2017), Salamanca, Spain (2018), Radenci, Slovenia (2019), and Oslo, Norway (2019). Most recently, in December 2020, I attended the virtual International Institute of Archival Science conference and associated training. This series of lectures and workshops is held each year by the State Archives of Trieste, Italy and the University of Maribor, Slovenia and this year (2020), it was attended by 110 participants from 17 countries. I have also been accepted to present in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates in October 2021 at the International Council on Archives (ICA) Congress, which is held every four years. My paper entitled, “Breaking Access Barriers to Archives Using Innovative Technologies: Projects of the Fashion Institute of Technology Library Special Collections and College Archives,” will be the culmination of work with augmented reality and 3D rendering technologies as means of sharing usually restricted and static archival content with an unusually wide audience.

The year 2017 saw my being invited to participate with a select group of FIT Non-Classroom Faculty (NCF) colleagues to try and better standardize criteria for NCF promotion. As a result, the task force, along with Vice Presidents Giacomo Oliva and Kelly Brennan, created a clearer framework for both faculty and administration to work within and allow NCF to aspire to promotion at the College. 

Also in service to FIT, I was elected or recruited to the following Faculty Senate and College-wide committees: FIT Faculty Senate Student Affairs Committee, 2016-2018; FIT Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Standards, 2016-2018; FIT Academic Advisement Center Tenure and Promotion Committee, 2014-2018 and 2019-2020, Chair 2015-2018; Writing & Speaking Studio Associate Director Search, 2017; Records Advisory Group, 2018+ Environmental Health and Safety Committee, 2019+; and the Employee Health and Safety Advisory Group , 2020+. I also was honored to volunteer as a Commencement Marshall for the years 2016 and 2017.

The year 2018 ushered in my practice of podcasting. With my archivist-husband, we inaugurated the “An Archivist’s Tale” podcast in February 2018. To date, we have interviewed more than 120 archivists and archives-adjacent professionals from all over the United States and the world (including Germany, Iraq, Ecuador, England, Iceland, Norway, Slovenia, and Mexico). The podcast essentially serves the profession as an oral history program as its mission is to give voice to archivists. It documents archivists in conversation with archivists, discussing their work and passions and how they care for the historical record and present the storied past.

While important, international activity did not and does not substitute for national professional involvement. I have attended and presented at the Society of American Archivists (SAA) over many years and in 2018, I chaired and moderated a conference session entitled, “Building Bridges: The Co-Education of Archivists and Architects on Major Renovation Projects” in which four archivists partnered with four architects discussed their experiences with special collections and archives renovation projects. I had not chaired a session for SAA before and found organizing eight presentations within a single subject framework an enjoyable challenge.

Also for SAA, I have served in various leadership roles including serving on the Editorial Board for the society’s journal, The American Archivist, and for the College & University Archives (C&UA) Section of the society. For the journal, I peer-reviewed fifteen articles. Before completing my AA Board tenure, I initiated guest editing a special section focusing on design records; this issue is scheduled for publication in fall/winter 2021. Eight articles were submitted and they are being revised for resubmission as I write this narrative. 

For the C&UA Section, I was elected a Steering Committee member in 2019 and then elected as Vice Chair/Chair-Elect in 2020. I very much enjoy serving the nearly 1500 members of the most populous section of SAA and am excited to help execute its future endeavors. In addition, for the C&UA section, I have hosted an online weekly chat session, engaging college and university archivists from all over the USA, sharing triumphs and challenges associated with myriad situations including responding to COVID-19, social unrest, race relations, and specific working from home obstacles and rewards. This chat series began in mid-March 2020 and continues today.

The Archives Leadership Institute is a highly-competitive national program funded by the National Archives and Records Administration’s National Historical Publications and Records Commission. It is administered by a Steering Committee formed from leaders of SAA. In 2018, I was one of twenty-five professional archivists from around the USA selected to participate in the program, which on impact, gave me much more confidence and comfort to be a better leader for my unit, my department, the College, and my profession.

International leadership opportunities presented themselves in 2019 when I petitioned to be a member of the Access to Memory (AtoM) Foundation Board of Directors; I am now the Board’s Vice Chair. That international body is made up of eight Directors from the USA, Canada, and England who have adopted the use of the archives management software program, AtoM. It is a web-based tool to bridge the gap between those who seek archives-hosted information and the relevant content to satisfy their scholarly needs. The Foundation Board of Directors is charged with the further development of the tool to keep that satisfaction sure and over the long-term. As Chair of the Foundation’s Roadmap Committee, I work with nine other international members to bring AtoM not only to its brightest future, but also to its best incarnation; together, committee members are building a better bridge.

The measure of my success is gauged in part by how much data, information, knowledge, and/or wisdom I can give away. As such, and also of note have been the opportunities SPARC has had to share its valuable content via loans to various cultural institutions, both domestic and abroad. I enthusiastically authorized the loan of materials for important exhibitions to the Bard Graduate Center (New York City, French Fashion, Women, and the First World War, 2019), the Eduardo León Jimenes Cultural Center (Santiago, Dominican Republic, Oscar de la Renta, 2019), and the Society of Illustrators (New York City, Fashion Illustration: the Visionaries, a Century of Illustrations from the Frances Neady Collection, 2019). Such opportunities are an important aspect of promoting SPARC, and by extension, FIT and its rare if not unique holdings.

The FIT oral history program entitled FIT Talks generates unique, primary source content to enrich the scholarship of those with relevant interests in fashion design, education, and business among others. With the generous, annual funding from FIT President Dr. Joyce F. Brown, I have conducted or arranged for thirty interviews since mid-2016 that reach across a variety of relevant creative and business sectors and FIT administration and faculty. The program is ever-evolving and ever-expanding to mirror the curricula and scholarly needs of FIT students and faculty as well as external researchers.

I simply love engaging with the FIT students and finding innovative and imaginative ways to collaborate with them and associated faculty members. Early in 2018, I approached Professor Denyse Montegut of the Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice (F&TS) graduate program and Professor Anne Kong of the Visual Presentation and Exhibition Design undergraduate program to realize a dream of mine: to commemorate the life and legacy of Max Meyer, a principal of Abraham Beller & Company (a women’s cloak and suit manufacturer in business from 1890-1931), a maverick in the fields of fashion labor relations and education, and a founding father of FIT. At my disposal were roughly 9000 charming Beller fashion sketches in the SPARC catalog and I envisioned matching or coordinating some of them with garments from the F&TS Garment Study Collection. In short, a dozen F&TS graduate students gained valuable garment conservation experience, curatorial experience, and exhibition planning experience over the course of about 1.5 years. Because of COVID-19, a planned physical installation in the Pomerantz Lobby/Art & Design Gallery is on pause at the time of this writing; however, a multimedia virtual experience was released in December 2020 via SPARC Digital.

My immediate plans include my completing or supervising the tasks related to a “Save America’s Treasures” (SAT) grant funded project, advising two F&TS graduate students’ thesis work, and resuming my PhD studies.

In concert with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Department of Interior awarded me an SAT grant to preserve three important SPARC manuscript collections, each representative in their own way of the rich history of New York City’s Garment District. As a result, circa 100,000 records will be state-of-the-art preserved for long-term accessibility. The award was for $83,100.

On the recommendation of Professor Lourdes Font and Adjunct Professor Sarah Byrd, I accepted the opportunity to advise the thesis work of F&TS graduate students Emily Werner and Micaela Castillo. Each is focusing her thesis work on materials integral to SPARC holdings and all agreed I would be a preferred advisor. I accepted this responsibility with joy as it has been a true pleasure to work so closely with F&TS students in the past as they complete their degrees and reach such an important milestone in their academic careers.

At the time of my initial engagement with FIT in 2008, I had earned 18 credits toward my PhD in Informatics. I am thrilled to have found an even more suitable program in Archival Sciences at Alma Mater Europaea, headquartered at the University of Maribor in Maribor, Slovenia where I can reach this personal goal and professional milestone. I began my PhD studies in December 2020. Fulfilling this pursuit, I will become even more active on the national and international stages in professional organizations such as the Society of American Archivists and the International Council on Archives, specifically ICA’s section on university and research institution archives.

Ultimately, I aim to extend and exhaust my professional and leadership experience to the betterment not only of the profession but also of FIT, and, by extension, bring the role of the Head of Special Collections and College Archives to many decision-making tables at the College and beyond.