Wednesday, December 09, 2009

WCRT-endorsed panel accepted for SAA 2010

We are pleased to announce that the session "Beyond the Ivory Tower: Archival Collaboration, Community Partnerships, and Access Issues Building Women's Collections" was accepted for SAA's 2010 annual meeting in Washington, DC. The participants include T-Kay Sangwand, Rebecca Johnson Melvin, and Elizabeth Myers, with Danelle Moon serving as the panel chair.

Archivists are working in greater numbers in complex collaborations with local communities to identify, obtain, and provide access to archival records. This panel will explore three models where collection development and documentation strategies merged under the umbrella of community collaboration. The panelists will further demonstrate how successful projects identified and facilitated access to at-risk materials, especially those related to women's second wave feminism, African-American, Latina, and Lesbian women.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Annual Report, 2008-2009

Greetings! Here is a copy of the WCRT Annual Report submitted to SAA following the annual meeting in August:

Co-Chairs: Danelle Moon and Kelly Wooten

Annual Meeting: 5:30-7:30, August 12, 2009, Austin, Texas

Annual Meeting Minutes:

The WCRT convened at 5:30 with 17 members and 10 additional panel attendees. WCRT and LAGAR co-sponsored a panel presentation that included Kelly Kerbow Hudson, Nikki Thomas, and English Professor Lisa Moore. The session provided collection highlights from the Benson Latin American Collection and from the UT San Antonio "Women & Gender Project," as well as a very interesting discussion on how scholars use archival resources.

The business meeting followed the panel. The Program Committee representative, Nancy Beaumont, gave a brief presentation on the 2010 conference. Following her talk, the members/attendees introduced themselves and we discussed the continuation of the currant co-chair leadership, which was approved. In addition, we passed a resolution to elect two vice-chairs, as a means to mentor new roundtable leaders for 2010-2011.

Leadership for 2009-2010:

  • Danelle Moon, San Jose State University: Co-Chair
  • Kelly Wooton, Duke University: Co-Chair
  • Cassandra (Cassie) Schmitt, University of Oregon: Vice Chair
  • Meghan Lyon, Duke University: Vice Chair
We also talked about developing a WCRT blog that we could use to publicize events, exhibits, new collections, lecture series, and so on. The Chairs/Vice Chairs will work on developing a blog platform, with basic rules that we can use to improve communication. In order to create a diverse blog, we talked about using the membership list to request individuals to write a brief summary of a specific collection, initiative, exhibit, etc. We need some feedback from the membership list to confirm interest in the blog and solicitation of contributors. In the meantime, we will begin to work on developing a blog for the roundtable, and will send out notification when it is complete (late September or early October).

2010 SAA Panels:

We discussed various panel presentation ideas for SAA 2010 (Washington, D.C.), and we heard from the program committee on the scope of the conference and deadlines. We have not received any proposals to endorse, but we are confident that we will have at least one panel if not two that we can endorse in October.

WCRT offers its sincere thanks to LAGAR for co-sponsoring the panel presentation.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Welcome to the WCRT Blog!

The Women's Collections Roundtable promotes the preservation and research use of records documenting women and networks archivists with holdings concerning or created by women. We are a part of the Society of American Archivists, North America's oldest and largest national archival professional association.

We have decided to start this blog as an easy way to update members on Roundtable activities, as well as to post announcements, links, stories, and other news related to women's collections. We invite you to subscribe to the blog so that you receive notifications of new posts. For more information about WCRT, please visit our homepage.

(Photo credit: LOC)