(Image caption: Tulane University Libraries colleagues Jennifer Waxman, Melissa A. Weber, and Madeleine Wieand presented the session "Centering Culture and Community: Responsible Description, Preservation, and Digitization of Mardi Gras Indian and Black Masking Indian Materials" at ARCHIVES * RECORDS 2026, the Society of American Archivists' annual meeting.)

Tulane University Special Collections (TUSC) and Tulane University Libraries (TUL) Digital Initiatives staff played a prominent role in the Society of American Archivists (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.

Setting the Stage: Workshops and Tours

The conference opened on July 28 with a full-day workshop, "Toward Indigenous Archives and Sovereignty: Developing an SAA Certificate Program that Centers Relationships, Responsibility, and Reparative Practice," 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. Archivists and community practitioners worked through case studies and collaborative activities aimed at shaping a future Indigenous Archival Stewardship Certificate.

The following day, TUSC opened its doors for a repository tour of its Jones Hall spaces and collections, led by Samantha Schafer. That afternoon, TUSC also hosted an in-person SNACSchool session focused on archival discovery and cross-institutional collaboration, welcoming roughly 25 archivists from around the country.

Tulane Voices on the Panel Circuit

Throughout the week, Tulane staff took the stage in several education sessions:

• Samantha Schafer and Erin Kinchen-Addicks spoke on a panel about applying project management principles to archival work, sharing strategies and case studies for tackling overwhelming project scopes.
• Jillian Cuellar, director of TUSC, moderated a candid discussion among archivists from institutions that had centralized their archival technical services, exploring the effects of functional reorganization on workflows and staff morale.
• Jane Fiegel of TUL Digital Initiatives helped facilitate the SAA Research Agenda Forum in her role as co-chair of the Committee on Research Data and Assessment, having helped lead the grant that supported development of SAA's new research agenda. Fiegel also joined the panel "When Systems Speak: Practical Strategies for Connecting Archival Description and Digital Objects," where presenters from four institutions shared strategies for linking digital objects to archival description and compared practices against the new Delivering Archives and Digital Objects: a Conceptual Model (DadoCM), touching on tools including ArchivesSpace, Preservica, Islandora, CONTENTdm, Alma, and Primo VE.
• Jennifer Waxman, Melissa Weber, and Madeleine "Maddy" Wieand presented "Centering Culture and Community: Responsible Description, Preservation, and Digitization of Mardi Gras Indian and Black Masking Indian Materials," which examined how Tulane's curatorial, collection management, and digital library teams collaborated to process and provide access to early 1970s documentation of New Orleans Black Masking Indian and Mardi Gras Indian culture, and how community guidance shaped preservation and access workflows.

• Kure Croker of TUSC 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 and Agnieszka Czeblakow also appeared at the SAA Bookstore to sign copies of their new book, Radical Visions: New Perspectives on Special Collections Curatorship.

Beyond the Convention Center

Tulane's presence extended into the wider New Orleans archival community as well. 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 work with the New Orleans Preservation Coalition.

Tulane University Special Collections librarians Jennifer Waxman and Melissa A. Weber were selected as trainees in the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) Training of Trainers program. Offered by the CAW Collective, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to community-centered audiovisual preservation and training, the program prepares participants to organize and lead Community Archiving Workshops in their own communities.

After completing the multi-month program in July, Waxman and Weber helped plan and lead a CAW on August 1 in New Orleans, presented in conjunction with the 2026 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The workshop partnered with local nonprofits CubaNOLA Arts Collective and Guardians Institute to support the preservation and inventory of their community-held audiovisual collections. Waxman and Melissa Weber joined the trainee cohort for a Community Archiving Workshop held at the George and Joyce Wein Jazz & Heritage Center. 

The one-day workshop centered community building and the preservation of audiovisual collections, bringing together archivists and community volunteers to inspect and inventory a local organization's audiovisual holdings. Waxman trained volunteers on inventorying the collection, while Weber celebrated the day's work alongside CAW volunteer Sheree "Gigi" Camel; Herreast Johnson Harrison and Cherice Harrison-Nelson of the Guardians Institute; and Lerin Williams of The Cultural Heritage Collective.

In addition, Weber will serve as the first CAW Fellow in the CAW Collective's pilot Fellowship Program. Through December, she will continue working with the CAW Collective and local community partners on post-workshop collections care and preservation planning while furthering her professional development in community-centered audiovisual archiving.

A Week of Leadership and Collaboration

From shaping the future of Indigenous archival stewardship to training the next generation of community archivists, Tulane Libraries staff helped set the agenda at this year's SAA Annual Meeting — sharing their expertise, welcoming colleagues into their collections, and reinforcing New Orleans' place at the center of national conversations in the archival profession.