Wednesday, July 29, 2026 – Saturday, August 1, 2026
New Orleans, Louisiana
We are living in a period of momentous change for the archives, records management, and cultural heritage professions. These changes have affected everything from workflows to community engagement, and from personnel issues to sustainability. Different types of repositories have experienced these political, technological, cultural, and environmental forces in diverse ways. ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2026 gives us an opportunity to take stock, to explore innovative solutions to the problems we are encountering, and to assess our professions’ history, practices, assumptions, and training.
The Program Committee seeks perspectives from across our profession that help us strengthen our professions’ diversity, our institutions, and our people. We encourage proposals that demonstrate the amazing variety of ways to be an archivist and to participate in the archives profession. The Committee recognizes that creating a sustainable and bright future for our profession involves creating a diverse program in which participants can freely choose the topic they wish to share. Therefore, instead of specific topic suggestions, we pose the following questions to hopefully prompt some ideas for your session proposals.
- How can the histories of our professions inform our current situation?
- What are the impactful practices you have implemented in appraisal, processing, access, community engagement, preservation, or management in response to recent changes?
- What types of technological changes have you implemented at your institution, and how were you successfully able to advocate for those improvements?
- How do you appraise, gather, store and provide access to data, and how do you determine whether your practices are ethical?
- How does archival training and professional development need to change to adapt to changes in our professions?
- How can workplaces be more responsive to the needs of employees, including such issues as disability and trauma?
We welcome proposals on all topics related to archives and archival work.
The submission form will be available by mid-November. Learn more about submitting here.
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SAA Headquarters
Society of American Archivists
Chicago IL
saahq@archivists.org------------------------------