Annual Meeting Recap: Roll with the Changes

Thank you to everyone who came to the Reference, Access, and Outreach Section meeting in Austin last week. There were a number of interesting competing section meetings and we hope those of you who attended found the meeting informative. A quick recap of the meeting for those who were not able to attend or for those like me for who the annual meeting can be a bit of blur.

The call for proposals for DC2010 was shared with the RAO members in attendance fully participating in the briefing. The only piece of information the crowd did not recall was the page number for more information in the program. Due date for proposals is September 24th and the Steering Committee looks forward to reviewing many for possible endorsement!

The report from SAA Council followed with a review of the advocacy agenda, strategic planning, increased transparency of Council meetings, and other news shared.

George Bain shared a call to compile a list of friends of the archives groups in the U.S. & Canada this year. Feel free to contact George directly or watch for his appeal coming in the near future.

Todd Kosmerick shared that an ARL Spec Kit on outreach has been approved. He and his co-author hope to utilize the section for feedback and other information. Expect announcements, drafts, etc. from the authors in the coming months!

Newsletter Editor Nancy Melley shared the results of the Newsletter Task Force and justification for amending the Section's by-laws (see pages 8-10 of the most recent RAO newsletter). The by-laws revisions were approved by the membership.

Past chair Lynn Eaton shared the slate of candidates with attendees and ran the election. Congratulations and welcome to new members of the RAO Steering Committee!

Vice-chair: Jim Gerencser, Dickinson College

Steering Committee Member (2009-2011): Beth Bensman, NARA
Steering Committee Member (2009-2011): Jill Severn, University of Georgia

Danna Bell-Russel provided an update on the section's National History Day efforts. Visit the RAO website for further updates and recent information.

Shannon Bowen Maier could not attend the meeting, but an update on the MPLP Task Force's continuing work was shared and will be distributed. An MPLP Best Practices Guide has been proposed (2008 report).

The remainder of the section meeting was spent in breakout sessions. Attendees chose from several topics including National History Day, MPLP, 2.0/Social Media, User Studies/Metrics, the Section's Mission, and the SAA Advocacy Agenda to share experiences with and discuss. The notes taken in these small groups will be shared on this blog and the Steering Committee hopes that those in attendance as well as those who could not attend will share further thoughts, suggestions, and reflections on these topics in the comments. This feedback will then be used by the Steering Committee in formulating the section's agenda and priorities as we move forward. If you have any thoughts on the small group discussion format or the annual meeting, feel free to share your thoughts here or with a member of RAO's Steering Committee.

If you were not able to attend the RAO meeting in Austin, we hope to see you in Washington, D.C. in August 2010.

Update: The notes from the discussion group of RAO's mission and metrics and user studies are now available with the others to follow.

Annual Meeting Reminder: This Time We Mean It

The Reference, Access, and Outreach Section's annual business meeting is Friday, August 14th at 1pm in room 400 at the Austin Hilton. The agenda includes:

-Welcome & news from the Chair (including 2010 program committee & Council)
-Update on National History Day (NHD)
-By-laws revision
-Election of new officers
-Breakout sessions on: NHD, MPLP, 2.0/Social Media, User Studies/Metrics, RAO Mission, SAA Advocacy Agenda

Hope to see you there, but if you are not able to make the meeting we will be posting a meeting summary here on the blog after the meeting.

Choosing Sessions to Attend: Good Trouble

If you're anything like me preparing for (or at least thinking a great deal about) Sustainable Archives: AUSTIN 2009, the list of things you would like to do and "have to" to do is growing exponentially. Here are a couple session suggestions related to reference, access, and outreach with more to come in the new issue of the RAO Newsletter next week. Are you part of or know of a session you think RAO members won't want to miss? Feel free to share your two cents in the comments.

A couple sessions looking interesting to my eyes today:

Session 101: Building, Managing, and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online

Session 104: The Real Archives 2.0: Studies of Use,Views and Potential for Web 2.0

Session 306: Omeka: Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Enhance Digital Content

And in a recent message to the RAO listserv Doris Malkmus shared how Session 404: Collaborative Teaching and Learning in the Archives: Assessment and Insight she is part of may be of particular interest to RAO members:

"As part of the panel, I will report on current research about faculty practices using archival and online primary sources to teach undergraduates; Barbara Rockenbach will discuss the library at Yale's new, active learning approach to user education for undergraduates, and Magia Krause will present an assessment tool she developed to test student learning before and after user education. Chair Peter Wosh will comment on the significance of these findings and fresh approaches. This session should prove valuable to all archivists working in an academic setting and to anyone working with novice researchers or interested in new practices in teaching history and user education."

What has caught your eye?

Section Election: Live It Up

Sustainable Archives: AUSTIN 2009 is just around the corner and preparations for the Reference, Access, and Outreach Section annual meeting are reaching a fever pitch. RAO is again meeting in the post-lunch slot on Friday, August 14th from 1-3pm. One order of business always on the section's agenda is the election of new officers. We are very pleased to share this year's slate.

Vice chair/chair-elect:

• James Gerencser, Dickinson College

Steering Committee (2 positions):

• Beth Bensman, NARA
• Bridget Burke, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
• Jennifer Davis McDaid, Library of Virginia
• Jessica Lacher-Feldman, University of Alabama
  
• Blynne Olivieri, MLS Student, University of Washington – Seattle
• Jill Severn, University of Georgia

Thank you to everyone for volunteering to stand for election! Complete candidate biographies will be available on RAO's website and via the next issue of the newsletter coming out next week. Further information, including how you can vote, will also be distributed via the RAO listserv and here.

Update: Candidate bios and Section by-laws revision information are now available. Please log in to cast your ballot online by July 31st or if you prefer, you may vote at the RAO Section meeting (have we mentioned lately that it is Friday, August 14th at 1pm?).

Call for Content

I am preparing a newsletter for publication around July 1. If you have any announcements or articles you would like to share, please e-mail them to me at raonews@gmail.com by June 15.

Thanks.
Nancy

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.
acs

Building the Bridge: RAO Annual Meeting

The schedule for Austin 2009 was released in April and the RAO Section meeting is scheduled for Friday, August 14th, 1-3pm. A brief description of the section meeting is that after the annual business meeting (news, reports, updates, etc.) and election, attendees will engage in a strategic planning session. Meeting attendees will divide into working groups to discuss and propose strategic directions for RAO from the core values of the section to the role RAO can play in various trends, activities, and developments in archival work (e.g., MPLP, 23 things/Web 2.0, National History Day, etc). If you have suggestions for a stragetic planning topic, want to voice your particular interest in one of the topics mentioned here, or have a question, leave a comment here or contact a member of the Steering Committee.

More information will be available as Austin approaches and you will find that information here, the RAO listserv, the RAO website, the SAA meeting wiki (when it is open), and RAO's Facebook group, so however you prefer to receive information from amongst those options, watch for news from RAO. See you in Austin!