Fellow: Jennifer Meehan

Jennifer Meehan, director of the Library of Congress’ Special Collections Directorate, will be inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) during an awards ceremony at the Annual Meeting of SAA in Chicago, IL. The distinction of Fellow is the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and is awarded for outstanding contributions to the archives profession.

Meehan, who holds a master of archival studies degree from the School of Library, Archival, and Information Science at the University of British Columbia, has been an advocate for increased accessibility and inclusion in the archives throughout her career. She has worked as a professional archivist in six different institutions over the past twenty years, beginning as a manuscript archivist at Virginia Tech. Meehan moved from there to a project archivist position at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She assumed her first supervisory role at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where she began as accessioning archivist and later took on the role of head of processing. From Yale, Meehan became associate director of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, directly overseeing the processing and cataloging, reference and instruction, born-digital archives, digitization, university archives, and records management operations of the unit. She made the move to repository leadership in 2019, becoming the head of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State University, where she provided leadership and strategic direction for all of Penn State's archives and special collections activities. In 2022, Meehan joined the Library of Congress, where she continues to provide leadership for its six special collections divisions.

During her time as an archivist and administrator, Meehan has been an active contributor in many organizations, such as the Association of Research Libraries, the Big Ten Academic Alliance Heads of Special Collections, the Archives Council of the Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education, and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. 

Meehan’s impact is best demonstrated through her leadership, scholarship, and commitment. She has had a profound intellectual effect on the field through the quality, quantity, and breadth of her writing, and her work has been highly cited throughout the literature of archives and related fields. She has published five peer-reviewed articles in American Archivist, Archivaria, and Archival Science, and two essays in edited monographs. Perhaps her most important piece of professional writing is “Making the Leap from Parts to Whole: Evidence and Inference in Archival Arrangement and Description.” This American Archivist article has been a staple on the syllabi of archival education courses since its publication in 2009. Meehan’s work also pushes the profession to examine and understand the broader meaning of the archival endeavor, particularly evidenced in her article “Towards an Archival Concept of Evidence” (Archivaria, 2006) and her essay “Archival Intangibles: Empowerment Through Story and Meaning” (Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark A. Greene, 2019).

In addition to her writing, Meehan’s contributions to the profession are evident in her leadership in SAA. She was one of the instructors of the SAA workshop “Implementing More Product, Less Process,” which was offered nine times from 2010–2012. This workshop provided archivists with a new intellectual framework for assessing backlogs and processing projects, along with techniques for appraising, arranging, describing, and preserving archives. Meehan also served on the American Archivist Editorial Board for eight years and was elected to leadership roles as vice chair/chair for both the Description Section and the Research Libraries Roundtable. Meehan has been a part of many other committees including the 2017 Annual Meeting Program Committee, the Calvin Pease Award Subcommittee, the Description Section Steering Committee, the Leland Award Subcommittee, and the Membership Committee. As co-chair for ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2020, a fully virtual conference due to COVID-19, Meehan and the rest of the committee seized the opportunity to create a program that allowed the Society to convene productively online, addressing new issues related to working in a pandemic and confronting racial injustice as a much greater imperative for the field. Her leadership in this area represents another significant demonstration of Meehan's commitment to change and action in seeing archives help create a more just world. 

As one supporter noted: “The breadth and depth of Jennifer’s contributions to the field are truly impressive, and she has an admirable track record of active, engaged, innovative, and visionary professionalism.” Another added: “Like many archivists, she thinks deeply about the work she is engaged in; what sets Jennifer apart, however, is her ability to articulate her ideas in accessible ways and her commitment to sharing her ideas widely through writing, teaching, and presenting.”