PLASC Meeting Minutes 2021 March 16

Public Library Archives & Special Collections Section Meeting

Society of American Archivists

March 16, 2021, 4pm EST

Agenda

Meeting Minutes doc

Approve February 16, 2021 meeting minutes

Updates

Chair, Angela Stanley

Mid-April deadline for section meeting submissions

The announcement has not gone out as it was supposed to. It seems that they’re trying to avoid overlapping times among sections. It looks like these will be free and not contingent upon registering for the conference.

No updates from Council re: advocacy petition

No update beyond Rachel’s acknowledgement that they received it.

Vice Chair & Newsletter Editor, Patricia Delara

No updates. Will post call for submissions this week.

Website, Johanna Russ

Posted last month’s minutes, maybe? Will check. 

No updates. Will post approved minutes soon.

Secretary & Social Media Coordinator, Dylan Gaffney

Three twitter polls. Around 20 responses each. Will start a new document with results for each one. Will continue going on. Fun and engaging, have gained followers. If we can come up with more questions, he’ll keep posting.

Discussion about the vaccination question. Make it less about personal medical information and more about access. Reworded together.

Survey Working Group, Catherine Oseas & Heather Lanctot

Survey Stats & Map

Catherine worked to tease out the information in the above linked document. What the survey may not have gotten to the heart of--what is the good work that public library archives do that justifies funding. This is a difficult data point to get at and quantify. Goals of the survey were to produce something splashy that took the data and said, here’s why we are worth the funding. Maybe shift from advocacy tool to informational share.

Trying to decide where to go from here. What should we do with this data, and should we try to get that non-quantifiable info. An idea--put on a workshop with a PR person to try to figure out how to tell these stories. Maybe ask participants to share their products to put together a PLASC-wide thing--website, advocacy toolkit, etc. Who is our audience? Don’t need to market to researchers. Maybe internally to funders? Always about money. External advocacy and internal advocacy tools aren’t so different. Advocating for funding from external stakeholders (donors?) as goal.Tailoring advocacy for different types of institutions. 

How do you operationalize the data to make it easy to sell your services/purpose to potential donors?

Will put out survey data as a survey report.

Maybe this could be our SAA annual meeting.

Outreach, Laura Carroll

Laura is willing to research possible other speakers in addition to the ones Angela is exploring.

Old Business

New Business

Section Meeting program @ SAA Annual (July 2021)

Maybe partner with Lone Arrangers to put the PR workshop on. We could then have more money to pay speaker and potentially get at deeper dive. 70 minute session.

Action Items

Angela will follow up with Felicia re: cost for section meetings (free meeting / paid presenters)

Angela will reach out to Lone Arrangers to see about interest in a joint section presentation

Potential speakers - Deborah Hakes, Sam Winn, Bryan Whitledge

Adjourn