CDSS Archiving Toolkit: A Quick Start Guide

Susan Creighton is a retired professional archivist who has worked in a variety of settings, most recently Vermont Folklife as their Associate Archivist. In her former career, she was a classroom teacher in Maine and Massachusetts, and later a researcher and teacher-trainer with Education Development Center in the Boston area. She has been involved in folk music and dance ever since one of her high school friends discovered Ted Sannella’s monthly dance in Concord, MA, in 1978. Since then, she’s been a contra and English dancer, a morris dancer, and a contra dance musician.

When the opportunity arose to create the CDSS Archiving Toolkit, it was the perfect blend of her experience and skills applied to the folk dance world that she loves, and she dove in enthusiastically. She hopes you like the results.

Pat MacPherson has spent most of her working life in the fields of editing, writing, and book production. While at CDSS from 1993 to 2017, she created multiple books and pamphlets about traditional music and dance. In 2009, she started the English Dance Oral History Project, collecting stories from more than 100 individuals and families, which will reside at the CDSS Archives at the University of New Hampshire’s Library of Traditional Music and Dance.

Her interest in life stories rests in her life experiences: having lost the family historian of her father’s family before the stories were recorded in any way and mourning the loss of that treasured archive. Her schooling is in social and cultural anthropology; she is a voracious reader, a dance musician and band leader, and photographer. She works directly with clients, conducting interviews and turning those interviews into keepsake products. She also supports Susan in archiving materials and creating guides to the completed archives.