A Research Agenda for the Society of American Archivists: Open Call for Feedback

IMLS Grant Funded Initiative

In late July of 2024, the Society of American Archivists received a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant program to establish a prioritized research agenda for the organization that builds upon SAA’s recently adopted Research and Innovation Roadmap. Spearheaded by the Committee on Research, Data, and Assessment (CORDA) and with funding from IMLS, SAA convened 33 archival experts, educators, community leaders, and grantmakers—archivists from across key sectors and professional positionality as well as relevant non-archivist stakeholders—to be part of a professionally facilitated two-day forum that took place in Chicago on May 1-2, 2025. The participants were selected from an open call application process to form the Research Agenda Advisory Collective. 

Process: 2-Day In-person Forum and Virtual Facilitated Discussion Sessions

Over the course of the two-day forum, the Collective worked collaboratively to identify the profession’s most pressing research needs through a series of exercises in the form of defining a research agenda, a SWOT analysis, developing and refining a criteria rubric for prioritizing research topics, and prioritization of research clusters into distinct themes.

The following was produced: 

• A definition of “research agenda”
• A criteria rubric for prioritizing research topics
• Six research themes: rethinking archivists training, demonstrating the value of archives, collaborating with communities, making archives more accessible, engaging with technology, and responding to climate crisis
• A redefinition of the audience from the profession writ large to the Society of American Archivists

To transform and further refine the prioritized six themes into a Research Agenda, the CORDA-core team re-engaged the Collective, soliciting volunteers for virtual focus groups dedicated to each theme. The CORDA-core team also disseminated an initial draft of the Research Agenda’s six thematic areas to the Collective for their feedback and edits. The edited drafts for each theme were then used to guide the six, 90-minute focus groups utilizing the Liberating Structures Conversation Cafe facilitation model. The discussions generated during these sessions, along with the Collective’s feedback and draft edits, informed the direction and content of the first draft of the SAA Research Agenda Draft (SAA-RAD). 

How to Provide Feedback and Next Steps

SAA-RAD is available for public comment from Friday, January 16, 2026 to Friday, January 30, 2026. When providing feedback you have two options:

1. Make inline comments in the google doc
2. Provide more general comments in the google form 

*A Google account is not required to post comments or submit survey responses, so members can share their feedback anonymously if desired. 

Starting February 2026, the CORDA-core team will incorporate feedback from the open comment period and finalize the Research Agenda and accompanying maintenance and dissemination plan. To document the process of agenda creation for transparency and replicability, a white paper will be published on the SAA website and submitted to the American Archivist for publication. The de-identified data collected from the facilitated discussions and findings will be deposited into the SAA Dataverse for public online access and reuse.

We look forward to your feedback.