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In attendance:
1. Roundtable co-chair Conor Casey (Labor Archives of Washington State, University of Washington) opened the meeting, explained that co-chair Traci Drummond was unable to attend due to her professional activities and introduced incoming co-chair Catherine Powell (Labor Archives & Research Center, San Francisco State University).
2. Kate Theimer, council liaison, gave an overview of the rule that all SAA roundtables must adopt bylaws by 2013. LAR must adopt these as well before the next annual meeting. Kate also detailed ways in which roundtables might request the necessary AV resources and improve the roundtable session scheduling by articulating the need to SAA council and the program planning committee.
A discussion of the bylaw process and the roundtable scheduling process ensued. Conor Casey, Catherine Powell, and Barb Morley volunteered to serve on LAR’s bylaws committee to get a draft before the membership via the listserv in time for the next conference.
In addition, Kate talked about the revisions in SAA council’s policy toward roundtables and social media. For the most part, roundtables are free to manage these on their own as long as they provide a link-back to the SAA main website.
It was also suggested that we might make a statement as a roundtable regarding social responsibility requirements in choosing the annual meeting venue in light of what happened in Chicago last year with the boycott of the conference hotel.
3. Catherine Powell from the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University gave a slide presentation on LARC’s collections and detailing the challenges and process of moving into a new location on campus.
4. Everyone introduced themselves and talked about the current projects they are working on and their current outreach activities.
5. Conor Casey proposed the idea of a topical labor archives discovery interface that would search across repositories’ hosted EAD records. The Northwest Digital Archives has expressed some interest in the idea and Casey was assessing interest of LAR members. A discussion about the technical requirements and need for smaller repositories to participate without EAD formats ensued. Casey explained that this would be a multi-phase, iterative process with the ambition of total access, broad participation for all repositories with labor collections, and search capability for multiple finding aid formats.
Several related project ideas were discussed:
Ben Blake (University Archives & Special Collections, Youngstown State University) suggested a comprehensive survey of labor collections as part of our documentation strategy.
Barb Morley (ILR Catherwood Library, Cornell University ) suggested that we might compile a spreadsheet to help identify gaps in documentation and perhaps create a listing of endorsed labor archivists in different geographical areas that labor unions could draw upon to consult about their records.
6. Idea of a tribute to Michael Nash. ---- talked about the upcoming memorial events at the end of September.