In addition to supporting faculty, students, and researchers from around the world, TUSC team members believe our special knowledge and skills obligate us to contribute to the wider library and archival professions and to our community at large. He is some of what we’ve been doing locally and nationally. 

TUSC Shares Archival Resources at GenFest 
 

TUSC participated in GenFest 2026, a genealogy celebration presented by the New Orleans Public Library’s City Archives and Special Collections. Held April 11 at NORDC’s Milne Recreation Center, the free public event brought together hundreds of attendees with archives, libraries, museums, and other organizations working in public history and cultural preservation. TUSC’s participation was organized by Melissa A. Weber. In addition to Melissa, Agnieszka Czeblakow, Faye Daigle, Lee Miller, Lori Schexnayder, and Kevin Williams (pictured) engaged with attendees and shared TUSC resources related to genealogical and archival research. [Photo via this Box link.] 

WGNO Spotlights Digitized Collection on Mardi Gras Indians 

WGNO-TV featured TUSC in a story about the recently processed David Elliott Draper Collection on Mardi Gras Indians, which documents New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian and Black Masking Indian culture in the early 1970s. In the interview, Jillian Cuellar and Melissa A. Weber of TUSC, Madeleine Wieand (Digital Production Librarian for Tulane University Libraries), and TUSC librarian Jennifer Waxman highlighted the collaborative work involved in preserving, digitizing, and providing access to the collection’s audio recordings, photographs, and other materials. The full segment can be streamed on the WGNO Website. 

Collaborative Community Archiving Initiatives 

TUSC librarians Jennifer Waxman and Melissa A. Weber completed the multi-month Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) Training of Trainers program, a national initiative dedicated to community-centered audiovisual preservation. Following their training, Waxman and Weber co-planned and led a local CAW on August 1 in New Orleans, held at the George and Joyce Wein Jazz & Heritage Center in conjunction with the SAA Annual Meeting. 

The one-day event partnered with local nonprofits CubaNOLA Arts Collective and Guardians Institute to support the inventory and preservation of community-held audiovisual collections. During the session, Waxman trained volunteers on collection inventorying, while Weber worked with all volunteers. 

Special Achievements and Recognition 
Melissa A. Weber was appointed as the first CAW Fellow in the CAW Collective's pilot Fellowship Program to lead post-workshop collections care through December. Additionally, Weber volunteers with the Greater New Orleans Archivists (GNOA) Mentoring Program, serves on the Ad Hoc Fundraising Committee, contributed a piece titled “Something in Common: Curation in Special Collections and Archives vs. Everyone” to Curatorial Duties, Ethics, and Best Practices (a chapbook published by Columbia University Libraries), and earned her M.A. in Musicology from Tulane University in May 2026. Congratulations, Melissa! 

Tulane Librarians and Archivists Take the Stage at SAA New Orleans 

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) is the world's largest archival organization, serving more than 6,000 members across the globe and setting professional standards for the management and preservation of historical records. Tulane University Special Collections (TUSC) and Tulane University Libraries (TUL) Digital Initiatives staff played a prominent role in the SAA Annual Meeting, held July 28 through August 1 in New Orleans. Across five days, Tulane librarians and archivists organized events, moderated panels, presented on professional projects, and welcomed colleagues from around the country into their reading rooms and collections. 

Workshops & Tours 

• Toward Indigenous Archives and Sovereignty: The conference opened on July 28 with a full-day workshop dedicated to developing an SAA Certificate Program that centers relationships, responsibility, and reparative practice. The session was held onsite at Tulane University Libraries and co-hosted by TUSC alongside SAA's Native American Archives Section and the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library.
• TUSC Repository Tour: On the morning of July 29, Samantha Schafer led visiting national colleagues on a repository tour of TUSC's Jones Hall spaces and collections.
• Onsite SNACSchool Session: On the afternoon of July 29, TUSC hosted an in-person SNACSchool training session. This specialized workshop focused on using Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) tools for cross-institutional collaboration and discovery, welcoming roughly 25 archivists from across the country. 

Presentations & Panels 

• Erin Kinchen-Addicks and Samantha Schafer spoke on an educational panel about applying project management principles to archival work, sharing strategies and case studies for managing overwhelming project scopes.
• Kure Croker spoke on a panel about recognizing, processing, and mitigating trauma in archival work, sharing perspectives on trauma-informed practice alongside colleagues from other institutions.
• Jillian Cuellar moderated a discussion among archivists from institutions that had centralized their archival technical services, exploring the downstream effects of functional reorganization on workflows and staff morale.
• Jane Fiegel, Metadate Librarian for Tulane University Libraries, helped facilitate the SAA Research Agenda Forum as co-chair of the Committee on Research Data and Assessment. Fiegel also joined the panel "When Systems Speak: Practical Strategies for Connecting Archival Description and Digital Objects," sharing institutional metadata linking methods against the new Delivering Archives and Digital Objects: a Conceptual Model (DadoCM).
• Jennifer Waxman was invited to speak at a private SAA Foundation fundraiser hosted at L9 Center for the Arts, the home and studio of local photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, where she discussed her local disaster recovery work with the New Orleans Preservation Coalition.
• Madeleine "Maddy" Wieand (Digital Production Librarian for Tulane University Libraries) Melissa A. Weber, and Jennifer Waxman, co-presented "Centering Culture and Community: Responsible Description, Preservation, and Digitization of Mardi Gras Indian and Black Masking Indian Materials." The session examined how Tulane's curatorial, collection management, and digital library teams partnered with local communities to shape workflows for early 1970s documentation.