PLASC Meeting Minutes 2019 November 13

Public Library Archives & Special Collections Section Meeting

Society of American Archivists

November 13, 2019, 3:00pm EST

Minutes

Present: Angela Stanley, Johanna Russ, Catherine Oseas, Derek Mosley, Heather Lanctot

Notetaker: Johanna Russ

Approve October 10, 2019 meeting minutes

Minutes were approved.

Updates

Welcome new Steering Committee Member Catherine Oseas

Catherine is an archivist at Birmingham Public Library. She does a little bit of everything in her current role. She wanted to join PLASC so she could become more involved at the national scale with the profession. She is also looking for solidarity and perspective from fellow public library archivists.

Committee updates:

Chair, Angela Stanley

This month, Angela invited general PLASC members to call into the meeting, not just steering committee members. She plans to send the notice out further in advance next month. This is an effort at transparency.

Share access to 2018 Meeting Minutes

This was a planned discussion item, but it appears the meeting minutes are already available on the website.

Section-hosted table / speaker @ Annual Meeting

Angela heard back from SAA on our questions about a PLASC-sponsored presence at SAA. SAA will not finalize their table plans until March or April. They will note our interest in having a table and will confirm if they have enough room to add PLASC. They usually do, but it depends on the hotel’s configuration. 

SAA also explained that some groups request funding for speakers such as non-archivists in an allied field or international archivists. There is a process for requesting those funds.

Someone asked if we knew yet when PLASC meeting will take place. Angela will follow up with SAA about the schedule. It was noted that it would be disappointing to fund a speaker with no attendance if the section meeting falls early in the schedule. A Committee member liked the idea of finding a public librarian or public library staff member to give that perspective. It was clarified that we were talking about hosting a speaker in the context of a PLASC-sponsored session rather than in the context of our section meeting, which might avoid scheduling issues. 

Newsletter, Patricia Delara

Patricia was not on the call but submitted a report to Angela. Patricia attended the California Library Association and presented on PLASC and how we can help librarians working in archives, special collections and local history. The response was positive. Some of Patricia’s own colleagues did not know about this resource and will pass along the info to their staff that were unable to attend.

Patricia also created PLASC promotional material: button templates. They are saved to the PLASC Google Drive. Feel free to adjust according to buttonmaker size! She passed these out at CLA along with the bookmarks Angela created.

Newsletter: deadline is this Friday, November 15. Patricia is open to extending the deadline if we would like more submissions or give our members more time to submit. Someone asked how many submissions we have received so far? Angela didn’t know, so we’ll follow up with Patricia.

Patricia also thanked Johanna for adding our newsletter to our microsite.

Social Media, Dylan Gaffney and Derek Mosley

Dylan was not on the call, but Derek reported that he and Dylan are working to schedule a call with each other to develop a plan of when to post and how often. They now have the log-in info. They want to promote the newsletter. Angela noted that last year, most of PLASC’s social media presence involved retweeting and promoting/amplifying others.

Website, Johanna Russ

Johanna reported that she, too, now has log-in info and has successfully made updates requested of her. She noted that the Resource List was mentioned in the past as a place in need of improvement. Let her know if you have specific changes you want to see.

Discussion Items

SAA session proposal

It was agreed we will not submit a PLASC-sponsored session proposal. Patricia is working with colleagues to submit a proposal related to public library archives, but it will not be PLASC-sponsored.

Survey of public library archives and special collections

This came to the fore as we were trying to create advocacy documents that could say, ‘did you know x number of public libraries collect…?’ Turns out we don’t have that kind of information. So we’ve decided we should conduct a survey to collect that data. Who do we need to help design and disseminate the survey?

What questions do we want answered?

Is outside funding necessary?

Angela learned from SAA that sections are not authorized to seek external funding without Council approval so that there aren’t competing proposals and so that accounting rules are followed. Other section-created surveys recently have done them on their own using SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics. Women’s Section did a salary survey on their own but then got help from SAA to get someone to analyze it. Suggested we contact the new SAA research group that was formed, in part, to help sections conduct surveys such as this. SAA is doing an update of the A*Census.

Partner with OCLC Research, LYRASIS, or other?

Hoping Catherine would be a point person for this initiative. Reach out to the SAA research committee to start learning about the process. Expect that it would extend into 2020-2021 leadership cycle. Catherine is happy to coordinate.

Reverse engineer—what data are we hoping to get out of this? What questions would elicit that data? Person in charge of the collections often doesn’t have a title that distinguishes them as archives/special collections. Heather Lanctot will help Catherine.

Heather—can we jump on the national SAA census survey and put in a few public library questions? We don’t know the answer but will ask.

Maybe some places already have some of this data, like IMLS. But we have not done an exhaustive lit review on what’s out there currently.

Action Items

Derek & Dylan meet to develop social media plan.

Heather & Catherine contact SAA research committee to learn how they can help with our survey and how we should go about it. Also ascertain whether we can add questions to A*Census.

Angela will ask if SAA has scheduled the section meetings for annual meeting yet.

Adjourn