This afternoon I enjoyed the exciting opportunity to participate in an open forum sponsored and led by the Communications Technology Working Group.
Over the next year, as SAA examines a wide variety of practices as an organization, one of the areas I’m most interested in is the organization’s response to the abundance of social media platforms that can be used to spread the word.
The committee members leading the session included:
* Rebecca Goldman, Digital Archives Technician at Drexel University; author of the web comic Derangement & Description
* Brad Houston, University Records Officer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, home of the SAA Archives
* Elizabeth Skene, Curator and Archivist at the Arab American National Museum
* Eliot Wilczek, University Records Manager in the Digital Collections and Archives Department at Tufts University
* Elizabeth Yakel, Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan
* Brian Doyle (Chair), SAA Director of Member & Technical Services
They gave us, the participants the chance to share what we, as members would like to see from SAA. Using SWOT analysis, we began to deconstruct the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of SAA communications.
Here are a few of suggestions or opportunities that participants shared:
– Increase the use of hashtages in Twitter for workshops and continuing education sessions held throughout the year, so people who can’t attend can still learn what’s being taught.
– Include session summaries on the SAA website or other forum of these workshops, to foster conversations after the event has taken place among those who attended and those who did not.
– Create a blog to aggregate the wide array of content generated by our community.
– Ensure that hotels hosting the annual meeting can offer wifi to encourage and promote the use of “back-channel” discussions on Twitter.
– Make is possible for members to tweet as the SAA twitter feed and be the voice of the organization for a day, week, etc. to encourage more members to have a voice and participate in the organization.
The discussion generated during the session concluded with an interesting observation: “We’ve never had an SAA President who blogged or had a Twitter feed.”
I’d like to challenge the in coming President, Gregor Trinkaus-Randall to add a social media component to his tenure as President.