PLASC Meeting Minutes: 2020 June 10

Public Library Archives & Special Collections Section Meeting Minutes

Society of American Archivists

June 10, 2020, 3:00pm EST

No Agenda shared

Present: Angela, Patricia, Petrina, Heather, Jo, Dylan

Check-in 

Notetaker (notetaking doc)

Approve May 13, 2020 meeting minutes

Updates

Tech Help used by libraries for appointments. LibCal (Patricia), 

Survey - suggestions received for eliminating a few questions, strong intro from us as a group about nature, goal of survey. Open-ended question at end to ask about individuals' situation with Covid closing instead of survey questions on subject, will data received be reliable, useful if we keep questions as is. Qualtrics recommended as survey software. We need to find a source for access to software. Petrina will follow up with Council about possible future use of an SAA account. 

Do we want to keep Covid-19 questions? If removed, should we address it in intro or elsewhere? We don’t want to pretend things are the same as Feb. We want to use this info to better understand the collections in public libraries. Knowing the impact is part of that equation. Questions as opposed to open text field, will give us data and encourage contribution, whereas open text fields will be hard or impossible to quantify and incorporate comments into our results. Can we make the covid section optional to clearly delineate between sections and allow people the freedom to not answer. If we follow up with a second survey when more is known, when budgets have been established, how can we compare the results? The group decided to keep questions as is, and to do it as a Google Survey as we do not have the capacity or access to Quantrics at this moment.

When do we want to send survey out? How to allow for time for responses and then tabulation, data analysis (before annual meeting?). 3-4 weeks recommended. Instead of presenting/report out at annual meeting, use meeting to say “this is what we are doing”. Proposed to release a survey a week prior to our section meeting.

Annual Meeting - Awaiting guidance from SAA on the nature of the virtual annual meeting, specifically how sections should proceed and participate, and established guidelines for programming. We have at least one of Jo’s colleagues on board for a prospective program.

Adjourned at 4PM EST