Fellow: Pamela Hackbart-Dean

Pamela Hackbart-Dean, director of the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU), will be inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) during a ceremony at the SAA Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, July 23–29. The distinction of Fellow is the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and is awarded for outstanding contributions to the archives profession.

Hackbart-Dean, who earned her master’s degree in history and archival management at the University of Connecticut, has distinguished herself as a thoughtful leader. Her nominators describe her as a “skilled teacher” and someone for whom “to be a professional archivist is to be active—to publish, to present, to serve, to mentor, to collaborate, to learn, and to question.”

A presenter at numerous conferences and instructor at workshops, Hackbart-Dean has also published widely. As co-author of How to Manage Processing Archives and Special Collections, (SAA, 2012), she has contributed a practical step-by-step guide to processing, a project which supplements and develops her work as co-author of Processing Decisions for Manuscripts & Archives (Association of Research Libraries, 2009). She has served SAA in a variety of capacities: as chair of the Preservation Section, Oral History Section, Manuscripts Section, Labor Archives Roundtable, and Congressional Papers Roundtable, and Committee on Education; as a member of the Dictionary of Archival Terminology Working Group, SAA Mentor, and Program Committee for the 2002 Annual Meeting in Birmingham, Alabama; and currently as an elected member of the Council. She has developed two successful SAA workshops.

Her nominators uniformly reference her enriching mentorship as well as her ability to “knit together old colleagues to do new things.” Another of her supporters noted as extraordinary “the quiet role she has assumed in inspiring future generations of archivists by guiding, mentoring, and connecting, and by being herself a role model of leadership.”

Previous to her work at SIU, Hackbart-Dean served as head of the Special Collections and Archives and director of the Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University and, prior to that, as processing archivist for the University of Georgia’s Richard B. Russell Library.

Hackbart-Dean is one of six new Fellows named in 2017. There are currently 189 Fellows of the Society of American Archivists.