Women’s Collections Roundtable

I kicked off SAA2014 with the Women’s Collections Roundtable. We heard from Heather Slania, who is the Director of the Library and Research Center at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Heather presented about her work with web archiving. She framed her presentation in terms of encouraging the audience to think about how we can preserve women’s history being created online.

I was excited to hear Heather champion working across and beyond library departments to accomplish her goals. It seems we, as a profession, may still not be considering the benefits of working outside our archives. I’m glad to hear of this kind of collaborative project.

Heather also shared that she employs an “opt-out” copyright policy for the web archiving that she does. Artists can contact her and request that their sites not be captured, but Heather doesn’t contact artists ahead of time and seek their permission.

During the business portion of the meeting, we discussed contributing to the Roundtable’s blog and a possible Wiki editathon to tie in with Women’s History month.

Over dinner after the meeting, several of us commented about the great pre-conference symposium that took place last year at SAA and put on by the Women’s Collections Roundtable.

I wonder what ideas you all have for continuing that momentum in the years to come???