Dear Colleagues,
SAA's Committee on Public Awareness has two great posts to share this week from the ArchivesAWARE blog.
The first post is an interview with Ashton Wingate, the Digital Archivist of the
NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, Inc. (LDF) for our
There's an Archivist for That! (TAFT) series. The TAFT series features examples of archivists working in places you might not expect and helps to highlight important collections and the archivists who manage them. Wingate shares with us why he got into archives, the challenges and opportunities that come with establishing the NCAAP-LDF collection, and his advice for new professionals in the field.
The second post is a Q&A with Cecelia "Cece" Otto, a classically trained singer, composer, international best-selling author, and historian who has performed in venues all over the world both as a soloist and in ensemble. When we last heard from Cece Otto she was about to embark on a year-long tour of her women's suffrage movement program and
provided an interview for our
Archives + Audiences series. Then COVID-19 hit, cancelling many of her performances that had been months–if not years–in the making. Over the last six months, Cece has reimagined her living history program and agreed to share with us her ideas, tips, and lessons-learned so that all archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations can find the inspiration and know-how to pivot their own programming. Link:
https://archivesaware.archivists.org/2020/09/16/responses-retrospectives-cecelia-cece-otto-on-reimagining-living-history-performances-in-the-covid-era/. This information may be of particular usefulness to the archives with October is American Archives Month on the horizon.
If you have an idea for ArchivesAWARE or wish to contribute content please feel free to email (
archivesaware@archivists.org) the ArchivesAWARE editor Kate Barbera, or direct reply back to me.
Thank you,
Rachael