Society of American Archivists - UT Student Chapter

Society of American Archivists
University of Texas at Austin Student Chapter

24 March 2006 MEETING REPORT

Meeting opened at 12:10 pm

In attendance:
Sarah Quigley
Hope Rider
Sidney Tibbetts
Gabby Redwine
Ed Sevcik
David Gracy
Jen Lindley

Topic: Curriculum Forum

The curriculum forum will be held next Friday, March 31, from 12-1:30 in SZB 556. The forum will be open to everyone, and refreshments will be provided. Ed will make fliers for the event. The goal is to get the fliers posted by Monday. Sidney will buy refreshments.

Topic: Religious Archives Forum

The date for the forum has been set for April 13, from 4-5 p.m. Mark Duffy (Archives of the Episcopal Church), Kris Toma (Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary), and Susan Eason (Catholic Archives of Texas) will all be able to attend. They asked for examples of some topics the group might like for them to address. The members in attendance came up with the following ideas:

-unique problems that come up in religious archives
-permissions problems (e.g., personal material intermingled with professional material)
-unique material that pose problems (examples from Episcopal archives: diaries of missionaries in China, photos of native Alaskans)
-what influence does the church exert on their archives? What understanding of the archives does the church leadership have? Can the archives ever refuse to accept something offered to them by the church?
-funding questions and problems
-what kind of public access do your archives have?
-what do you do to raise visibility and/or promote archives within the congregation and/or administration of the organization?
-what special training or skills would you suggest for people wanting to work in a religious archives?
-what is necessary to do research in your particular archives?

Ed volunteered to take photos of the archives if necessary. The consensus was that Sarah would relay the proposed topics to the three archivists, and then if any of them felt that having a photo of their archives or an item within it was necessary to his or her talk, then Ed would be willing to go to the archives and take the photo.

Ed volunteered to create the flier for this forum.

Sarah is going to email the iSchool listservs about both this forum and the curriculum forum.

Ed suggested informing Ron Pollock and the Career Services Office about it to catch any students who might be interested in pursuing jobs in religious archives. He also mentioned notifying and posting at the Asian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies departments.

Sidney suggested sending an announcement and posting some fliers in the Religious Studies department.

Hope recommended contacting the On Campus Events folks to get the information included on their weekly, campus-wide email.

Topic: Other Events

iSchool week is an event celebrating the School of Information and is geared toward current iSchool students. This year it will be held from April 2-8. For more information, go to:SASI Events.

A Curriculum Think Tank is in the works, although the date/time of the first meeting has not yet been set. Among the topics up for discussion will be the current core courses offered at the iSchool. If you're interested in participating or would like more information, please email Cara Johnston at caraj@mail.ischool.utexas.edu.

Sarah proposed reviving the SAA happy hour or starting some other kind of regular social gathering. Some of the ideas proposed were:
-weekly happy hour
-weekly Spiderhouse hour (or something similar that would provide non-alcoholic options in a non-bar environment)
-monthly dinner
-monthly potluck (on a smaller scale then the ones at Dr. Gracy's house)

The group agreed that it might be best to gauge interest before making a decision about what type of gathering to propose. The plan is to email the SAA list to get a sense of how many people would be interested in a regular social gathering, and what form the majority would like for that event to take. Once we have a list of people who would be interested in attending, we could create a separate "social" listserv so that the regular SAA (and possibly Insider) lists wouldn't get bogged down with purely social postings. Sarah will talk to Cara to find out more about the SASI happy hours.

Topic: National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) letter

The NHPRC has been denied funding (again) and archivists are mobilizing to write letters to members of Congress and participate in other forms of protest. Dr. Gracy proposed that our SAA chapter send another letter in support of the NHPRC. Sarah agreed to find last year's letter, revise it, and bring it to next week's curriculum forum for people to sign.

The next SAA meeting will be from 12-1 on April 7, room to be announced.

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Society of American Archivists - University of Texas at Austin Student Chapter
E-mail: saa@ischool.utexas.edu