Fellow: Kathy Marquis

Kathy Marquis of Laramie, Wyoming, will be inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) during a ceremony at the SAA Annual Meeting in Cleveland, August 16–22. The distinction of Fellow is the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and is awarded for outstanding contributions to the archives profession.

Marquis earned her bachelor of arts in history (with a concentration in women’s history) from the University of Michigan, where she worked as a student in the Bentley Historical Library, and her master of library and information science degree from Simmons College.

Marquis’s career has included a series of posts at several outstanding repositories where she has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to user needs, improved reference services, and developing reference literacy. Her career began in 1978 as an archival assistant at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she discovered her professional calling as a reference archivist. She then honed her reference, access, and public service skills at the Minnesota Historical Society before returning to her alma mater, Michigan, where she was head of the Reference and Access Division at the Bentley Library.

For the past twelve years, she was the public services librarian at the Albany County Public Library in Laramie, Wyoming, where among other things she promoted Internet access and literacy and organized book discussions and other public outreach activities.

Professional accomplishments include co-development of the SAA workshop “Real World Reference: Moving Beyond Theory”; guest lecturing at Michigan and Simmons; presenting papers at the annual meetings of SAA, the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC), the New England Area Archivists, and the Public Library Association; and co-chaired both SAA and MAC Program Committees and as chair of several SAA committees, most recently as co-chair of the SAA Task Force on the Annual Meeting. In addition, Marquis is the co-author of the forthcoming American Library Association book Local History Reference Collections in Public Libraries.

Marquis’s enduring—and endearing—contributions also include a unique and playful approach to engaging colleagues. She conducted a Haiku contest for a session at SAA’s 2009 meeting, a poetry contest in tribute to MAC’s 40th anniversary, and performed as an ensemble member of the “Raiders of the Lost Archives” during the 2014 SAA meeting.

Marquis is one of three new Fellows named in 2015. There are currently 184 Fellows of the Society of American Archivists.