Guest Blogger: Questions Not Answers

Guest blogger Susan McElrath answered the call (well, an email message) and agreed to share her thoughts on the discussion of RAO's mission in advance of the section's annual meeting. Susan is the Team Leader, Special Collections and University Archivist at American University and a past-chair of RAO.

The Reference, Access, and Outreach Section encourages you to attend the upcoming section meeting at the 2010 annual meeting. We will be breaking into discussion groups to discuss our mission. How do we define reference, access, and outreach? How do they interconnect? What do we want to do?

I have been asked to share some initial thoughts to get the dialog started. As I am not a member of RAO’s Steering Committee, my comments and questions should not be taken as the “official” opinion of our leadership. In thinking through what to write, I realized that questions not answers would be most beneficial. Some of these questions might be worth discussing during the section meeting.

Of the three, reference seems the most straight forward. But is the concept of reference changing? What is the role of the reading room and archivist? Is it possible for Archives to do reference via chat? Is there a role for text messaging? What web 2.0 tools should we be adopting? How many of you are already blogging, tweeting, and creating wikis? There have been numerous sessions at SAA on this topic. Are there recommendations/standards that RAO can share with its members? Should we be evaluating these tools – are they worth the time spent?

In Jan Blodgett’s February 19 posting to the RAO blog, she asked the question “A is for???” Are we talking about physical and/or intellectual access? Is our emphasis on addressing barriers to access (legal, ethical, descriptive)? Are we more interested in access policies – how we make collections available? How does this overlap with the work of the Description section? What about digitization? Are we more interested in the search interface, the selection criteria, the determination of what metadata to share, or all of the above?

Outreach potentially covers a broad territory including exhibits, education, and public relations. SAA is now an active partner on this front with the Archives Week PR kit, its elevator speech contest, and its support of NHD. Should we be doing more? Do we need to redefine RAO’s role in light of this positive change? SAA’s focus is on external audiences but what about internal audiences? Does this form of outreach require a different approach? Is this something we want to explore? Do we consider advocacy a part of outreach? Would we want to work with the Issues & Advocacy Roundtable?

In recent memory, RAO has emphasized outreach with projects relating to Archives Week and National History Day. Do we want to continue this trend? Are there new issues that we should address?

Would it be worthwhile to look at SAA’s publications and workshops to see what additional topics might be of interest? Several years ago RAO proposed a workshop on exhibits which was accepted and continues to be extremely popular.

My apologies for the somewhat disjointed posting. I hope that this provides some food for thought. I look forward to talking through these issues with many of you in DC in August.

Life As We Know It

Last winter the RAO Steering Committee discussed goals and planning for the section beginning at a draft document. While the conversation included goals that seem to show up in the planning documents for so many organizations - improving and varying communication, increasing member involvement, etc. - one issue that was a sticking point for many of us was the question of the section's mission. We came to a consensus that there is a need to define and relate RAO's three component interests to each other as well as other sections.

At the same time, Steering Committee members had received positive responses from members that the break-out small group discussions during the 2009 annual meeting were worthwhile and an attractive alternative to the usual conference session of presenters talking at the audience and planned a similar opportunity for the 2010 annual meeting. The Steering Committee agreed that at this year's annual meeting a part of the afternoon's agenda will be small group discussions about the R, A, and O. Keynote remarks from Jessica Lacher-Feldman from the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at The University of Alabama will precede the discussion and we look forward to what she has to say about what reference, access, and outreach mean to archives today to begin our in-person conversation. Update 7/8/10: Unfortunately, Jessica Lacher-Feldman will not be able to give a keynote talk at the RAO annual meeting.

We hope these discussions will give members the opportunity to interact with folks they wouldn't otherwise as well as get us thinking and talking about how the R, A, and O do or should function together within the section's mission and priorities. Frankly, I think a case could be made that the RAO Section might be better as - or simply acknowledge the fact that it has become - the OR Section.

Does an RAO still make sense? Did the archivists who organized the Reference, Access and Photo-Duplication Policies Committee (which makes me think RAO members with a sense of the section's roots may be passionate about RLG's "Capture & Release": Digital Cameras in the Reading Room report) have it right? Can a single section really lay claim to these distinct, yet related functions? Why is it that SAA has an RAO? Is it time to consider the OR (Outreach & Reference) Section? (If a DA (Description & Access) Section came to SAA, would another group step up and form a MA section or roundtable?)

Leading up to the annual meeting on Friday, August 13th at 1pm we hope to share a few posts with thoughts from other archivists on the R, A, and O. These may take the form of what reference, access, and outreach mean to archivists today, the relationships and intersections of the three, the section's mission, and probably more. RAO's webmaster Jan Blodgett shared some of her thoughts back in February and whether you will be in DC in August or not, I encourage you to share your thoughts there or elsewhere on this blog in the weeks ahead.

An Archives Reference Blog: Nine Lives

Two years ago my colleagues and I launched an archives reference blog at Dickinson College as a way to manage and share our offsite reference transactions. (It may be worth mentioning that this is not a traditional blog to which one would expect to subscribe; it is not our aim to tell an interesting story, but instead merely to provide the essential details of the request.)

Built using an open source software called Drupal, the primary intent of the blog is to provide additional access points by which potential users may discover our resources. Archives staff members write brief posts about what was requested and what was provided, and these posts may include links to related resources as well as relevant tags. It is this basic information that patrons may find when doing web searches; I can cite many examples of researchers requesting materials because a search engine brought them to a blog post of ours that mentioned those same materials being provided to a previous user. One added feature is that visitors to the blog can also use comments to point out additional resources or to post their own questions.

Besides drawing in new users, the other major purpose of the blog is to manage reference requests more effectively. Hidden from public view is an area in which staff members record contact information for the requester, details about the locations of sources that were used to aid the requester, and notes for statistical purposes to help us understand our researchers better. As a result, we can now retrieve information about past reference transactions in seconds, recreate searches when new patrons ask similar questions, and generate usage reports with ease.

My colleagues and I consider this blog to be a great success. We are currently seeking funding to develop an interactive online repository where we can post digital surrogates of the documents that our users request, allowing future users to retrieve the documents themselves as well as allowing them to describe, tag, transcribe, comment, and otherwise add value to the documents.

For a lengthier explanation about how our archives reference blog works, please visit this post on Mark Matienzo’s blog, The Secret Mirror. There is also a presentation on the Slideshare website that shows what the private side of the blog looks like. If you have any questions or comments about the archives reference blog, please feel free to contact me at archives[at]dickinson.edu.

Jim Gerencser is the College Archivist at Dickinson College.


If you have news from your repository you would like to share via the RAO News blog, contact one of the blog contributors on the left side of your screen.

I should note that I first became enamored with Dickinson's reference blog after hearing about it in a session at MARAC and readers may want to check out the liveblog recap from that session. Dickinson College's Archives and Special Collections has also recently begun a blog documenting women's experiences at Dickinson College to mark the 125th anniversary of coeducation at the institution. Also, while Jim gave me the idea to use REO Speedwagon song and album titles in blog post titles, the poor execution of that fine idea is purely my own fault.
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