PLASC Meeting Minutes 2022 January 19

Public Library Archives & Special Collections Section Meeting

Society of American Archivists

January 19, 2022, 1pm PST

Minutes

Present: Heather Lanctot, Laura Carroll, Johanna Russ, Matthew Peek, Dylan Gaffney

Catherine Oseas and Jasmine Jones were unable to get in call despite following link.

Approve December 15, 2021 meeting minutes. Moved and approved.

Updates

Chair, Heather Lanctot. Responses to PLASC member survey on desired resources and form to receive communications. Limited responses to survey, with split results among Blog, current format (Newsletter) vs. listserv. Agreed that blog is easiest and gives us the most flexibility for still getting info out through the other channels (social media, listserv). Top 6 resource categories from survey: Outreach, Supervision & Management, Digital Assets & Management, Partnerships & Collaborations, Collection Development, Policies & Procedures, Finding Aids & Cataloguing. 

SAA Council Liaison, Jasmine Jones - shared via email. 

Vice Chair, Laura Carroll - covered below.

Website, Johanna Russ - added Twitter to side of page, and November minutes.

Secretary & Social Media Coordinator, Dylan Gaffney

Outreach, Laura Carroll

Advocacy Resources, Matthew Peek

Agenda

Newsletter - Laura 

• Content from PLASC Committee members - Matthew submitted his piece, along with Heather and Catherine. Johanna and Dylan finishing their essays up. We should have several ready before rolling out so there are some things to look at when first visiting.

• New assignments for the next newsletter - revisit at the next meeting. 

• Make a decision about newsletter platform - Wordpress agreed upon by the group as the best fit. Title for site? “The public library archivist” ? members are encouraged to brainstorm. 

• Discussion of the look of the site. Image for banner, perhaps with logo incorporated. 

• Frequency of posts - consensus based on survey results and member inputs is that a couple posts a month should be sufficient. Formulate standard call for submission to encourage contributions (incorporate into listserv email)

Twitter - Dylan

• Questions for polls - formulating questions in spreadsheet into poll format where appropriate

Resources page on Microsite - Matthew

• Description Section Resource Page

• Decide on categories (5-10) based on Twitter poll and/or group consensus. 7 leading categories (see above).

• Assign categories. Matthew is doing related work for new job. If members come across good examples from public libraries, county libraries, regional libraries and public facing university libraries, they could share them. Assigning categories to reach out to colleagues for examples could be beneficial. How many do we want for each category?  A Minimal look can be better, perhaps 5 resources per category could be better, and we can then use outreach like twitter and listservs to encourage contributions. Matthew will create a spreadsheet for resources and assign categories. Heather - Outreach, Johanna - Supervision & Management, Laura - Finding Aids & cataloguing, Matthew - Policies & Procedures, Catherine - Partnerships & Collaborations, Dylan - Digital Assets & Management, Laura & Matthew - Collection Development & Management. With so many policies being updated, everyone should share your policies and documents where appropriate. Two sentence description accompanying list for each category. Matthew will share a basic structure for input and members can contribute to reach roughly 5 per category.

Speakers/Applying for funding from SAA - Catherine

• Update on Invisible Histories Project Workshop. March deadline, highly unclear what money can be used for, can they be considered a consultant, and can we pay them an honorarium.  Heather will check back with Catherine and try to get a sense of the possible costs we could use the funds for. 

Action Items

• 5 items per category for resources page as assigned.

• Banner and content for Blog/newsletter roll out. Populate the page and check back next meeting.

• Dylan will add details of twitter polls (character limits, number of responses, etc.) to top of spreadsheets. 

Adjourn