iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 6h

Since 2020, my shop has done free digital imaging for 40 different African American churches in the PC(USA) -- in the 15 years prior we did imaging for two (2) Still a ways to go, especially in GA, AL, MS. More to be done in VA, NC, SC #pcusa

Google map of the 400 African American or African diaspora churches in the PC(USA) as red placemarks, with black markers showing churches with work completed

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Reposted by David Staniunas

Martha Smith @mostlymartha.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Remember how I put pro-immigration signs outside my church? Well they keep getting stolen, and we ended up on the news. Who keeps stealing ‘Immigrants’ signs from this Oakland church? | KRON4 share.google/DGXzFGVL88q0...

share.google

Who keeps stealing ‘Immigrants’ signs from this Oakland church?

OAKLAND, Calif. (KRON) — If you drive by Montclair Presbyterian Church at 5701 Thornhill Drive in Oakland, it’s quickly obvious that a word is missing from the “Makes Our Communit…

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Reposted by David Staniunas

Presbyterian Foundation @pcusafoundation.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

We're #Hiring! Join the Presbyterian Foundation as a Philanthropic Solutions Specialist and help donors, churches, and advisors transform charitable intentions into meaningful impact. Learn more and apply today! bit.ly/4iRdVrj

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 22h

Had a good hour-plus with clerks and recordskeepers in the Presbytery of the Highlands of New Jersey on Saturday #pcusa

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Reposted by David Staniunas

UNRWA @unrwa.org · 05/10/2026

Back to school! In #Lebanon, UNRWA welcomes back over 35,000 #Palestine Refugee students to our 59 schools. UNRWA remains the main provider of education for the Palestine Refugee community in Lebanon. #UNRWAworks  #FundUNRWA

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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Found it! It’s Simon Tanner’s landmark 2004 study funded by the Mellon Foundation (Reproduction Charging Models & Rights Policy for Digital Images in American Art Museums). He surveyed 100 museums and found almost none recouped costs once staff time and overhead were factored in.

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I admire it so much. They finally said, Here is what this dumb idea looks like in reality

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sorry I remember Undue Diligence, and the Georgia uni that actually tried to get perms for descendants of every correspondent in a 19th c collection

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Reposted by David Staniunas

Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

About fifteen years ago (+/-), the British Museum (I think) did a cost analysis of the permissions process and determined that the staff overhead was much, much higher than revenues. Does anyone else remember this? Can you help me track it down?

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Libraries and archives stop turning "diversifying the holdings" or "amplifying marginalized voices" into cataloging somehow

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Reposted by David Staniunas

Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute @ronaldreagan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Some Ronald Reagan humor about socialism that feels a little closer to home these days.

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Wrote this all up to include some of the group's questions, and really to do some justice to their desire to get stuff online pcusa.org/news-storyte... 📦🗃️

pcusa.org

Hands-on Accessioning with First Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas

Image

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Earlier this week I was with the archives team of First Presbyterian Church, Dallas TX, who did a day of rapid appraisal and description -- 30 entries at the box-level for a little better than 24 cubic feet, the first 10 feet all minutes and scrapbooks made by Presbyterian Women -- all in 9 hours

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Okay just one more, from Benedetto, Conservation of Church Records (1985) Glad we've progressed beyond copying other people's hagiographies of Confederates

Benjamin Morgan Palmer, mentioned here as an orator and first stated clerk of the PCCSA, was most famous for his ardent defense of slavery as part of the natural order. He wrote that the South and God were in covenant to maintain and perpetuate slavery. He got killed by a New Orleans streetcar in 1902

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Were, were people teaching each other to cover paper in matte acrylic medium

Hints for better spraying (of what, God knows)

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Can you imagine if every church in the country kept all its "official correspondence"

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I just got a awesome piece of vintage advice

Suelflow, Religious Archives: An Introduction (SAA: 1980)

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The past decades where we take powerful people "seriously but not literally" should cease. We can start with "making terroristic threats" or "extortion" -- taking those speech acts literally and seriously

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"Doing archives stuff well" does not cause "being really well funded," and vice versa. I wish either one of those propositions was true

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I don't think any of the speakers addressed genuinely scaling back operations to core functions, actually

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Eleanor Brown of Cornell getting to managing reference (but still pretty uncontroversial): University is our constituency; we do less genealogy; we refer strange questions to researchers-for-hire; we don't charge for "public domain" images

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Oh Mr Greene: "Before we are forced to do less with less, we should try to do more with the same." Oh man I sympathize. But it just didn't turn out that way

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

If Drake would be interested in your infrastructure, it's still new

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"as we were completing our collecting policy and deaccession project, the university suddenly agreed to pony up a total of a million dollars to refurbish our security system and our dry pipe sprinkler system, both of which were original to the building in 1993" They were 17 years old dawg

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I am sorry for ignorantly writing about acquisitions and appraisal without engaging with Greene's work at Wyoming: 10,000 cubic feet sent to the shredder! Amazing

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There is a lot in here that is a "blast from the dysfunctional past" Greene, again: "implemented major alteration of our accessioning workflow, which now includes creation of a preliminary catalog record for every new collection" Y- you didn't write public descriptions, for new accessions

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The departed Mark Greene finally offering some things to give up, during a 10% cut: "annual staff retreat, our speakers bureau [...] cuts in our travel grants, teaching grants, and of course office supplies. And it meant eliminating one of our two annual newsletters" And also two staff out of 24

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"to me this legalistic response seems to suggest that one has no richer, no more intellectually robust or practical counter offer to make." And so I think: if you hate unions and tenure you should jump in one of Minnesota's many lakes

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"Now I haven't worked in an academic environment but I have worked under civil service regulations and union contracts. I certainly understand the rationale for employee protections against unreasonable and arbitrary actions. But

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Michael Fox of Minnesota Historical Society, listing reasons why change is resisted, which to me seems off-topic, offers: "Nine, I have tenure or I belong to a union. They can't unilaterally make me change the way I do my work or perhaps even what I do."

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

So far, we've listed "reducing hours staffed at historic sites"

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I am excited to listen to this presentation from 2010 📦🗃️

RBMS panel: Cutting to the Core: Letting Go Of Functions And Services

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Today we lump the splits. Might be another day where we split the lumps en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers...

en.wikipedia.org

Lumpers and splitters - Wikipedia

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Minutes are (supposed to be) approved annually, so there's no reason to have individual files for each month 🌈✨

Ten or twelve folders for six months of records

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

We are Trint subscribers, for gosh nearly a decade

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Reposted by David Staniunas

David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Just did some work on a NCC/NBC broadcast from 1968 with James Baldwin. Spend a little time with Fraudulent Innocence

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Just did some work on a NCC/NBC broadcast from 1968 with James Baldwin. Spend a little time with Fraudulent Innocence

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Vanity? And vexation of spirit? It's likelier than you think

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Like we put every public facing database into the Landscape Of Thorns

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Today searching WorldCat that process was click through Cloudflare, search, log in to see results of search, click through Cloudflare, see no hits, start new search, click through Cloudflare again

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Correspondence belongs to the recipient, and unsolicited packages are legal to throw in the garbage 📦🗃🚚

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"RTS" on the envelope, yes absolutely

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Second, professionals have to be allowed to do the searching and selection of donors. Here's @meau.bsky.social's slide of searches from the big union catalog SNAC: some 120,000 archival creators, 8000 of them PoC, 33,000 of them women -- archival holdings do not look like our society does

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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

First, we have to devote resources to original, unique records, under the hand of their creator. Books have multiples. Books everywhere

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