Annual Meeting Minutes

The Archival History Section held its annual meeting on June 19, 2023 online. 

Forty-two members registered; seventeen attended.

This year our welcome began in land acknowledgements and an acknowledgement that we met on Juneteenth, only the second year this date had been a national holiday. We asked members to consider then where this holiday had fit in their repository histories. We also included images of early Juneteenth celebrations from collected by texashighways.com/travel-news/the-history-of-juneteenth-in-photos/ from various Texas repositories.  

We then had a short business meeting which included reports in the following areas:

            -College and University Project 

            -Survey of Section Membership  

            -Newsletter and other chances to participate 

We then turned to the presentation of the annual awards, created to encourage and reward authors of an article or other short piece of superior excellence in the field of archival history, irrespective of subject, time period, or national focus. We think it important that one winner come from within the profession, with an active SAA membership, and one, from without the profession. This year’s awards went to Geoffrey Yeo (University College of London, and SAA member) for his article “Let Us See What Is Meant by the Word Recorde”: Concepts of Record from the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century, and to María Cristina Betancur Roldán (Medellín Ciudad Universitaria, and non-SAA member) for her article Archival Traditions in Latin America.

We then had our invited guest speaker, Katherine Ott, curator from Smithsonian’s Division of Medicine and Science at the Museum of American History, who addressed The Interrelationship of Museum and Archives via a display of records and materials on the history of the body, disability, ethnic and folk medicine, prosthetics and rehabilitation, gender and sexuality, visual and material culture. 

In closing we welcomed new members to the Steering Committee and spoke of projects to some, such as a writing group and completion of the College and University histories.