PLASC Meeting Minutes 2018 November 13

Public Library Archives and Special Collections (PLASC)
Section of the Society of American Archivists

Meeting Minutes

Teleconference (WebEx)

November 13, 2018

In attendance: Lauren Algee, Patricia Delara, Suzanne Im, Heather Lanctot, Angela Stanley

Purpose of Meeting: Share findings and recommendations for moving forward with creating and implementing our outreach/communications plan.

1. Social Media / Outreach

• Lauren and Patricia pasted their research of other SAA Twitter accounts on a PLASC Outreach document

• We can create a model with low effort and extend our reach as an aggregator

• Tweet every few weeks at a minimum

• Retweets with commentary or context of relevance to Section 

• Can pull language from other sections for a Social Media Manager position; pursue for next fiscal year

• Compile tweets into an aggregated email for listserv every month or every few weeks

• Angela would like the Twitter account handle to include “PLASC”; and in the bio, indicate our affiliation with SAA, and say we aim to lift up public libraries in this section 

• Lauren wants to wait on blogging. To do a good blog takes a lot of work and resources. A blog can always be added later.

• Patricia will look into getting an intern to work on social media/communications - starting a draft of guidelines and expectations of what intern will work on. Send Google doc to solicit feedback from committee members

• Steering committee would like to start a newsletter. Suzanne will test out aggregator for newsletter - Mailchimp, SAA Email platform, and other options. 

2. Advocacy Toolkit

• Heather and Suzanne have started to review the content on the PLASC Resources List (linked from microsite); it is useful, but needs to be pared down. 

• Content from WordPress site (https://localhistoryrt.wordpress.com/) also useful but needs to be tested for broken links, edited for brevity, and moved over to the microsite

  • Heather and Suzanne have an outline of sections, which Suzanne will move onto the working PLASC Outreach document

  • Each steering committee member can initial which WordPress site pages they want to go through before transferring over to microsite

• Suzanne will email Matt to inquire 1) how many microsite editors a section can have; and 2) is there is a microsite comment notification system; and 3) whether we can add the PLASC SAA connect page onto microsite

• Heather will start scouring SAA, ALA, CLA, etc. to try to find advocacy tools we can add/link to

3. Raising awareness (Angela)

• Lone Arrangers would be a good in-reach / outreach next step as a model for building messaging for our campaign. 

• We can share our advocacy toolkit with them once it’s complete. 

• Come up with “quick facts” that we can post online. Angela has access to data on the percentage of digital content is contributed by public libraries in GA, for example. We can pull facts from existing surveys and reports. 

4. Other business

• Suzanne introduced idea of assigning a “web master” role to a steering committee member or PLASC member for microsite

Next meeting: December 2018 (possibly) to check progress of work. Lauren will send an email.