17吃瓜

Charge

It has long been recognized that climate degradation in the form of air pollution, fire, and flooding poses serious threats to cultural monuments central to ASOR鈥檚 mission. The accelerating climate emergency calls for 17吃瓜to uphold this mission by addressing the contribution of its own activities to this global problem. A poster presentation by Lucas Stephens and Virginia Herrmann at the 2019 Annual Meeting, 鈥溾��, provided some first steps in this process. The poster performed an analysis of the carbon emissions of travel to the annual meeting from 2013 to 2018 based on attendees鈥� points of origin and the destination city, finding that emissions varied considerably based on the city and number of international attendees, and proposing several strategies to reduce travel emissions. The Board of Trustees has engaged in conversations about this issue over the past two years and working toward a carbon neutral Annual Meeting by 2025 is one of the goals of the 2021-2025 Strategic plan.

With these considerations in mind we are establishing an Ad Hoc Committee on the climate impact of 17吃瓜activities with particular attention to the Annual Meeting. The committee is charged with the following specific tasks:

1) to assess the carbon footprint of the Annual Meeting and ASOR鈥檚 other activities;

2) to evaluate the feasibility of the goal to make the Annual Meeting carbon neutral by 2025; and

3) to make recommendations to the Board of Trustees on how this might be achieved.

While the carbon footprint of 17吃瓜is not limited to the Annual Meeting, the meeting is likely the largest direct contributor to it. We therefore ask the committee to focus primarily on recommendations for reducing or eliminating the climate impact of the Annual Meeting. Additional discussions, study, analysis and recommendations for reducing the climate impact of other areas of activity (such as day-to-day operations, publications, and even ASOR-affiliated fieldwork) will be gratefully received, however, and may lay the groundwork for future initiatives.

It is envisioned that a starting point for the committee can be the 2019 study of Stephens and Herrmann, supplemented potentially by additional data and by comparison with studies of other academic conferences and mitigation efforts of other societies. In formulating its recommendations to the Board, the committee should consider the lessons learned from the 2020 virtual and 2021 virtual-component meetings, including issues of logistics, sustainability, finances, participation, and member experiences. The service of 17吃瓜Executive Director Andrew Vaughn as committee co-chair will facilitate the incorporation of these details, but information and input should also be sought from the Program Committee and Director of Meetings and Events Arlene Press. In addition to considering future virtual, hybrid, and/or distributed meeting modalities, the committee should also explore ways to incentivize members to shift toward more sustainable travel and consumption options.

We ask the committee to present a report answering the questions of whether and how the Annual Meeting can become carbon neutral by 2025 for the Fall 2022 Board of Trustees鈥� meeting.听It is hoped that an interim report might be available for Board discussion at the Spring 2022 Meeting in May.

Charge

The vast majority of the 17吃瓜archives consists of records, photographs, publications, and diaries amassed between ASOR鈥檚 founding in 1900 and the closing of its office at 656 Beacon St. in Boston in 2018.听 At that time most, with the exception of publications now stored at the Strange Center in Alexandria, were moved to the Harvard Semitic Museum (now the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East鈥擧MANE) and remain there today. Some few others are stored elsewhere鈥擥lueck materials owned by Harvard, AIAR records at the AIA, and the Leo Boer collection (see Ackerman document, pp. 6,7).听 The HMANE is no longer able to house the materials transferred in 2018 collection,[1] and 17吃瓜must determine how best to curate them. The decision involves four interlocking issues for the ad hoc committee to consider: location; organization, maintenance, and accessibility.

The first decision, on which the rest hinge, is location. Should we move the papers to the Strange Center or a library or other archival facility?听 We have the space on the third floor of the Strange Center for the roughly 125 archive boxes (1.5 cu. ft.), 73 boxes of glass plates (8鈥� x 5鈥� x 5.5鈥�), plus tubes (two 26″x 24″ and two 30″x 34″), flat portfolios, and rolled up large format sheets transferred to Harvard in 2018. The climate conditions at the Strange Center are as good as the Boston offices, but not up to top archival standards. Housing the archives at the Strange Center would put the maintenance and organization of them in the hands of the 17吃瓜staff, which has plusses (expertise and interest) and minuses (time commitment).

Turning to accessibility. The archives are stored in archival boxes, and there is a detailed finding aid. In an ideal word they would be fully digitized and accessible to researchers. This is not the case. Some material has been digitized, and at one point this digitized material was available on the archives webpage. Unfortunately, in Fall 2015, the Boston University server housing our archives database failed. Today, we have available a partial outline of ASOR鈥檚 holdings, and a “zombie database” that is used in-house. Digital materials can only be accessed on this “zombie database” by a staff member through a fairly cumbersome request process (see Ackerman document, pp. 5-6). A key question for the committee is how to improve that process. Non-digitized materials are for all intents and purposes currently inaccessible, given their current location at Harvard.

The Ackerman document also poses some issues regarding organization and maintenance that the committee will need to address: for example, work that might be done “in house” to reorganize the information we do have available on the web and to reorganize the “zombie database”; also, issues regarding our archiving policy and ambitions regarding collection augmentation going forward.