About the Summer Education Institute for the Digital Stewardship of Visual Information

SEI typically recruits new faculty instructors in the fall. If you are interested in teaching with SEI, we invite you to reach out to the SEI Implementation Team via email at sei@vraweb.org at any time for consideration for future iterations of the SEI.

SEI offers our faculty instructors an honorarium of $250 per instructional hour. Additionally, the Implementation Team's Faculty Liaison & Curriculum Specialists provide support to instructors as instructors design and deliver their workshops.

Instructors are welcome to attend any session during that year’s SEI workshop.

The SEI Implementation Team consists of members of ARLIS/NA and VRA. There are 3 types of Implementation Team position:

• Senior Co-Chair

• Junior Co-Chair

• Faculty Liaison & Curriculum Specialists (2 positions)
  

SEI team members receive stipends for their service. These amounts can be found within the linked job descriptions.

Typically, recruitment for these positions begin at the conclusion of each year's institute.

If you are interested in joining the SEI Implementation Team, we invite you to reach out to the current team via email at sei@vraweb.orgat any time for consideration in the next round in recruiting.

The Summer Educational Institute for Digital Stewardship of Visual Information (SEI) is committed to creating and supporting inclusive, diverse, and equitable communities of practice.

We strive to be a welcoming organization that provides information professionals with a substantive educational and professional development opportunity focused on the digital stewardship of visual information and the opportunity to create and participate in a network of supportive colleagues.

How to Be

SEI provides a workshop experience that is free from all forms of harassment and is inclusive of all people.

Small actions you can take will help us meet this goal. For instance, SEI suggests:

• Listening as much as you speak and remembering that colleagues may have expertise you are unaware of; encouraging and yielding the floor to those whose viewpoints may be under-represented in a group; using welcoming language, for instance by honoring pronouns and favoring gender-neutral collective nouns (“people,” not “guys”)

• Accepting critique graciously and offering it constructively; giving credit where it is due

• Seeking concrete ways to make physical spaces and online resources more universally accessible

• Staying alert, as Active Bystanders, to the welfare of those around you.

Likewise, it is important to understand the range of behaviors that may constitute harassment. Harassment can include unwelcome or offensive verbal comments or nonverbal expressions related to age; appearance or body size; employment or military status; ethnicity; gender identity or expression; individual lifestyles; marital status; national origin; physical or cognitive ability; political affiliation; sexual orientation; race; or religion.

Harassment can also include the use of sexual and/or discriminatory images in public spheres (including online); deliberate intimidation; stalking; following; harassing photography or recording; sustained disruption of talks or other bullying behavior; inappropriate physical contact; and unwelcome sexual attention.

Sexual, discriminatory, or potentially triggering language and imagery is generally inappropriate for any SEI event. However, this policy is not intended to constrain responsible scholarly or professional discourse and debate. We welcome engagement with difficult topics, done with respect and care. We invite you to read our Inclusive Language Guide.

What to Do

SEI will not tolerate the harassment of SEI community members in any form.

The SEI Co-Chairs will assist participants by asking participants engaged in harmful behavior to stop the harassing or intimidating behaviors and helping those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the event. All reports and inquiries will be handled in confidence.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact one of the SEI Co-Chairs immediately.

Ways to Contact the SEI Co-Chairs

• In Zoom, SEI Co-Chairs can be identified by their name and the phrase “SEI Co-Chair” after their name.

• Contact with the SEI Co-Chairs via email at sei@vraweb.org, which reaches all Implementation Team members. Participants at the SEI Workshop or any SEI-hosted discussion or event who are asked to stop harassing or intimidating behaviors are expected to comply immediately. Those who violate our code of conduct may be warned, sanctioned, or expelled at the discretion of the organizers.

We value your presence and constructive participation in our shared community, and thank you for your attention to the comfort, safety, and well-being of fellow SEI attendees, instructors, and Co-Chairs.

SEI Workshop Code of Conduct is adapted from DLF Code of Conduct CC-BY-NC 4.0, with reference to the ARLIS/NA Code of Conduct and VRA Code of Conduct.

SEI recognizes the colonial role of libraries and digital collections, and as digital stewardship professionals engaging with concepts of knowledge production, dissemination, and organization, we make this statement as an affirmation that we are committed to improving our profession’s practices.

It is important to acknowledge that across the many changes this land has experienced and despite the fact that colonial violence continues to negatively impact our Indigenous communities, the American Indian community sees the importance of the land as home to many diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

Because SEI team members, instructors, and attendees live all over the United States and Canada, it is imperative to acknowledge the physical land on which we are all individually located. We invite you to take a moment to reflect on the Indigenous land upon which you sit—geographically and digitally—and express gratitude for your ability to live, work, and enjoy the land. We invite you to research Indigenous projects, artists, and activism in your local area and consider appropriate actions of support.

The professional activities associated with the digital stewardship of visual materials make it incumbent upon us to consider the legacies of colonization and white supremacy embedded within the technologies, structures, best practices, and ways of thinking we use in our work and throughout the entire digital life cycle.

We recognize that during SEI that we will gather as part of a professional field with a colonial history and a colonial present, which causes manifold historical and ongoing harms and violence—including that of archival silence—whereby Indigenous people, voices, stories, and objects have been purposefully left out of or misrepresented in the historical record.

We hope we can lessen the ongoing harms of settler colonialism by responsibly speaking about it, centering those who have been harmed, and discussing appropriate action to identify and repair harm in our own contexts.

We invite anyone to discuss this statement so we can reciprocally learn and make efforts towards continued improvements.

The SEI's Land Acknowledgement is adapted with permission from Adrianne Wong of SpiderWebShow’s digital land acknowledgement for the Festival of Live Digital Art and prepared with reference to the ARLIS/NA 2020 Virtual Conference Land Acknowledgementand the VRA 2021 Land Acknowledgement. The framework is adapted from the Northern Alberta Health Library Association Land Acknowledgement, Template for Personalization, Definitions, and Speaker Protocol, 2019, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Resources

• https://native-land.ca/

• Guide to Indigenous Land and Territorial Acknowledgement for Cultural Institutions

• A Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgment

• Indigenous Knowledge & Decolonising through Critical Information Literacy

• Embracing a Complicated Relationship: Indigenous Museum Practices

We invite you to read our Inclusive Language Guide.