Meeting Minutes: August 12, 2009, Austin, TX

Annual Meeting: 5:30-7:30, August 12, 2009, Austin, Texas

Co-Chairs: Danelle Moon and Kelly Wooten

The WCRT convened at 5:30 with 17 members and 10 additional panel attendees. WCRT and LAGAR co-sponsored a panel presentation that included Kelly Kerbow Hudson, Nikki Thomas, and English Professor Lisa Moore. The session provided collection highlights from the Benson Latin American Collection and from the UT San Antonio "Women & Gender Project," as well as a very interesting discussion on how scholars use archival resources.

The business meeting followed the panel. The Program Committee representative, Nancy Beaumont, gave a brief presentation on the 2010 conference. Following her talk, the members/attendees introduced themselves and we discussed the continuation of the currant co-chair leadership, which was approved. In addition, we passed a resolution to elect two vice-chairs, as a means to mentor new roundtable leaders for 2010-2011.

Leadership for 2009-2010:

Danelle Moon, San Jose State University: Co-Chair
Kelly Wooten, Duke University: Co-Chair
Cassandra (Cassie) Schmitt, University of Oregon: Vice Chair
Meghan Lyon, Duke University: Vice Chair

WCRT Blog:

We also talked about developing a WCRT blog that we could use to publicize events, exhibits, new collections, lecture series, and so on. The Chairs/Vice Chairs will work on developing a blog platform, with basic rules that we can use to improve communication. In order to create a diverse blog, we talked about using the membership list to request individuals to write a brief summary of a specific collection, initiative, exhibit, etc. We need some feedback from the membership list to confirm interest in the blog and solicitation of contributors. In the meantime, we will begin to work on developing a blog for the roundtable, and will send out notification when it is complete (late September or early October).

2010 SAA Panels:

We discussed various panel presentation ideas for SAA 2010 (Washington, D.C.), and we heard from the program committee on the scope of the conference and deadlines. We have not received any proposals to endorse, but we are confident that we will have at least one panel if not two that we can endorse in October.

WCRT offers its sincere thanks to LAGAR for co-sponsoring the panel presentation.