Advocacy break out session notes

Here now for your reading pleasure are notes from the last, but certainly not least, break out session during the RAO meeting at SAA in Austin. The topics for the other break out groups were National History Day, Web 2.0, MPLP, metrics & user studies, and the mission of RAO. We hope you'll take a look and share your comments either here on the blog, via the RAO listserv, or with the Steering Committee privately if you prefer.

Advocacy: things RAO can do, things RAO should be involved in, areas we can contribute.

Notetaker: Arlene Schmuland

Suggestion of another topic of potential interest to RAO: Archivists as educators engaged in instructional activities. Provide training which includes learning theories, pedagogy, etc. Maybe a Toolkit. Teach people presentation skills, marketing, how to conduct workshops. (Noted that the Train the Trainer workshop offered by SAA is good, but would have been better if been archives-specific).

Regarding SAA’s request for feedback on Strategic priorities.

Some thoughts about feedback to GAWG. They’re collecting stories, but they need to turn around and provide those back: provide administrators with those stories. Provide a way to get past the basic statistical reporting to the stories behind. Maybe a YouTube page with video recorded stories? Feeds into GAWG and provides wide accessibility.

Create some sort of a webring to highlight organizations or projects.

Identify potential public awareness opportunities. e.g. the Jameson award. In need of greater PR or perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it. Need to push, not wait passively for people to come to us.

SAA is getting better about using Facebook (wonderful).

Develop some sort of RSS feed for changes to website?

Would it be possible to get volunteers for Brian who can help do the tech work? He’s doing huge amounts on his own and is there any of the work that could be handed off to others in order to speed up the project (conversion to Drupal content management system) as a whole? Can Brian come to us and ask us for help? Is there something RAO can do specifically to assist Brian with this or SAA with this?

RAO: blog/newsletter. Come up with a story about what the section is doing & working on? Highlight success stories! Seek them out. Our access portion of our work is important. What people do because of our work is the important part—not the work we do itself. We can sell what we do by what use is being made of it.

Promote repository diversity in the membership: deliberately seek out leadership opportunities for non-academics, and their stories.

We like the 3a task force charge. Yes!

RAO has front line people who know those stories better than anybody else. Let’s build a repository of those stories. And non-archivists talking about archives focusing on the product, the outcome.