Meeting Minutes: August 13, 2014, Washington, DC

MEETING MINUTES

Women’s Collections Roundtable

August 13, 2014, 5pm-7pm

Washington DC

Officers:

Helice Koffler | Co-Chair

Tali Beesley | Co-Chair (absent)

Stephanie Bayless | Vice Co-Chair

Leslie Fields | Vice Co-Chair (absent)

Rachel Appel | Incoming Vice Co-Chair

Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh | Incoming Co-Chair

Welcome/Introductions/Installation of New Officers

• Officers began the meeting with a general welcome and asked all attendees to sign in. We went around the room for brief introductions and introduced the new officers during this process.
• The meeting was well-attended - 41 attendees total, but only 26 signed-in as requested. Attendees hailed from institutions across the United States, including American Folklife Center, Rutgers University, National Archives and Records Administration, Tulane University, University of California Berkeley, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Presentation

Online Art Ephemera: Web Archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Beyond

Heather Slania, National Museum of Women in the Arts

Artist archives usually contain important primary source materials such as brochures, catalogues, checklists, artist statements, and dairies—but what happens when this ephemera is only online? The National Museum of Women in the Arts has been web archiving art-related online ephemera using the Internet Archive's Archive-It since November 2011. Heather Slania presented the considerations and challenges of archiving this material and discussed how arts institutions are beginning to work together for more collaborative web archiving.

Slania’s presentation was well-received. During the questions and discussion period, attendees asked about tools to use for web-archiving, social media archiving, and coordinating with other institutions to avoid duplication of effort.

Old Business

• WCRT Bibliography
  • We reminded members about the WCRT bibliography, which is a selection of published works that discuss archival theory and practice in relation to women’s archives/collections. We invited attendees to submit new additions to the blog whenever possible and asked for volunteers to read through the document and make sure all information was correct.
• WCRT Blog
  • We discussed the progress of growing the blog’s readership and the need for member post contributions. We discussed what has been posted and what the group would like to see posted in the future.
  • We encouraged attendees to send any press release or official news they wanted to share to the WCRT email address, even if the news had already been posted on their own social media sites.
  • We send around a sign-up sheet allowing members to volunteer to write a post of pick a specific month to search for women’s collections related news to share.

New Business

• Wiki-Edit-A-Thon
  • We discussed the possibility of sponsoring or facilitating a nationwide Women’s History Month Wiki Edit-A-Thon in March 2015.
  • Attendees discussed the pros and cons of attempting this kind of event in their institutions. Those attendees who had held an event like this before shared their experiences.
  • Overall, attendees were unsure if they would hold an Edit-A-Thon, but were interested in the WCRT exploring the possibility of providing a “How to host a Wiki-Edit-A-Thon” information packet.
• Tumblr
  • We discussed the possibility of starting a WCRT Tumblr. Attendees were very much in favor of Tumblr.
  • We discussed having leadership set up the Tumblr then having one or more members take over as admin to prevent confusion during turnover periods. Helice Koffler volunteered to be one of the admins. Mark Vassar from the Schlesinger expressed a desire to contribute many of their posts created for other media outlets.
  • WCRT will move forward with setting up a Tumblr page.

Program Committee Report

• The meeting concluded with a report from the SAA Program Committee about the 2015 meeting and call for presentations.
• The 2015 meeting will be held in a convention center instead of a large hotel. Sections and roundtables will no longer be endorsing presentations, but are encouraged to facilitate coordination between members with possible related topics.
• The program committee is encouraging proposals in a number of new formats and is introducing free form pop-up sessions to encourage continued discussion of popular topics during the conference.

Sixteen attendees continued the discussion and networking at a scheduled dinner at the nearby Lebanese Taverna.