Announcements

Please join the SAA Students and New Archives Professionals Section for the next #snaprt Twitter chat on Wednesday, May 29, at 8 pm ET co-hosted by SAA's Committee on Public Awareness (COPA). Join us as we discuss  invisible labor in the archives, erasure of archival labor, and "asserting the archivist." This chat will explore ways in which we can position archivists and/or professional archives work at the forefront of outreach efforts and how to counteract invisible labor in the archives.

We welcome everyone to join or keep up with our chat using the #snaprt hashtag on Twitter. The SNAP Section Twitter account (@SNAP_Section) will pose the following questions:

• What are some ways in which the labor of archivists is made invisible?
• Language like "unearthed," "unseen," "long lost," and "uncovered" dominates news articles on archival "discoveries." What are some other words/phrases that might better describe occasions of doing archival research?
• What are some strategies for advocating for and educating others about archival labor? In other words, how might we better "assert the archivist" (e.g. putting archivists and/or professional archives work in the forefront)?
• Do you have any favorite examples of repositories or individuals asserting the archivist in archival outreach (online or in-person)? Or do you have any personal experiences of asserting the archivist that you'd like to share?
• Some archivists may find asserting the archivist difficult, especially with "powers that be," due to lack of job security. What advice would you give an  archivist in this situation about getting a message across?

If you would like to have a discussion topic included in this chat, please send it to @SNAP_Section on Twitter, submit it through the anonymous form on the SNAP chat webpage or e-mail the SNAP Senior Social Media Coordinator at coletw@jmu.edu.

Here some resources related to next week's chat you may want to check out. Please share additional resources using #snaprt on Twitter or through the SNAP section SAA listserv.  

• Committee on Public Awareness (COPA), ArchivesAware! blog https://archivesaware.archivists.org/tag/asserting-the-archivist/

• Suzanne Fischer, "Nota Bene: If You 'Discover' Something in an Archive, It's Not a Discovery," June 19, 2012. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/nota-bene-if-you-discover-something-in-an-archive-its-not-a-discovery/258538/
• Bethany Anderson, "Sylvia Plath's New Short Story Was Never 'Lost'--so why is the media saying it was just discovered?" https://news.library.virginia.edu/2019/01/28/10262/

• Peel Art Gallery Museum & Archives, Archives @PAMA blog https://peelarchivesblog.com/
• S. Williams "Implications of Archival Labor," Medium https://medium.com/on-archivy/implications-of-archival-labor-b606d8d02014

• James Sommers, "Keepers of the Secrets," The Village Voice, September 20, 2017 https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/09/20/keepers-of-the-secrets/

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Tiffany Cole, MA, CA
Special Collections Archivist
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA
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