Barbara Teague, recently retired Kentucky State Archivist, will be inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) during a ceremony at the Joint Annual Meeting of SAA and the Council of State Archivists in Atlanta, July 31–August 6. The distinction of Fellow is the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and is awarded for outstanding contributions to the archives profession.
Teague is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Kentucky and holds a master of arts in public administration from the University of Virginia. She joined the staff of the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (KDLA) as a field archivist in 1983 and for the next 32 years indefatigably served the Archives and Records Management Division and the Commonwealth of Kentucky in a series of management positions, before being named Kentucky State Archivist and Records Administrator in 2008 and leading in that capacity until 2015. She also served as Coordinator or Deputy Coordinator of the Kentucky State Historical Records Advisory Board for over twenty years, working with repositories throughout Kentucky, and is the recipient of the Kentucky SHRAB’s highest honor, the Thomas D. Clark Archives Month Award.
As one of her supporters noted: “Barbara has been there to do what needs to be done for her colleagues in state government, whether it was slogging through the details of developing the first archival descriptive standards for state government records or confronting the challenges of managing electronic records.”
Her commitment to professional activities across her career is equally tireless. She is a past president of the Council of State Archivists, where she helped oversee two major multi-year programmatic initiatives: the FEMA-funded Intergovernmental Preparedness for Essential Records project and the inauguration of the State Electronic Records Initiative, which has now entered its fifth year of working to improve electronic records and digital preservation in state archives. She serves on CoSA’s Advocacy Committee, and is one of CoSA’s two representatives on the CoSA-NAGARA-SAA Joint Working Group for Advocacy and Awareness.
For SAA, she has most recently volunteered her time to the Committee on Public Policy, where she is incoming vice-chair, and is co-chair of the CoSA/SAA Joint Annual Meeting Program Committee this year. She previously served on the Government Affairs Working Group, the Standards Board, the Committee on Archival Information Exchange, the Committee on Regional Archival Activity, and as chair and steering committee member for the Description Section.
Teague is one of five new Fellows named in 2016. There are currently 185 Fellows of the Society of American Archivists.