Sign the Students and New Archives Professionals Roundtable petition!

Total signature count: 88! Thanks so much to everyone who signed! SAA says we don’t need any more signatures.

Hi everyone,

I submitted the SNAP Roundtable Proposal (click to open the pdf) to SAA last night, and now we need your signatures! Here’s how to digitally sign the petition:

1. Compose an email to saahq@archivists.org. (If you open this email link, it will do steps 2 and 3 for you!)
2. In the subject, put: Signature in Support of Petition to form the Students and New Archives Professionals Roundtable.
3. In the body of the email, write “I support the petition to form the Students and New Archives Professionals Roundtable.”
4. Include your contact information in a signature block at the bottom of the email.

A couple of  rules:

You DO have to be a current SAA member (student members count!) to sign the petition.

You DO NOT have to be a prospective member of the new roundtable to sign the petition. If you support us, please sign!

When you email SAA, please also cc NewArchivistsRT@gmail.com on the message–that way, we can keep track of how many signatures there are. (If you forget or don’t want to, that’s okay, your signature will still count.)

Please spread the word–we need 50 signatures! I’ll update this post over the next few days with our total signature count.

–Rebecca

Let’s write this proposal!

Our proposal is now a Google Doc that you can read and comment on! If you want editing privileges, comment here with the email address field filled out (it won’t be visible except to the blog admins) or follow the instructions in the Google Doc. Plenty of room to add more stuff, and please add anything you think is even remotely relevant–the proposal team will edit everything before we send it in.

Our goal is to submit the finished petition to SAA on Tuesday and start collecting signatures on Wednesday. To sign the petition, all you have to do is send an email to SAA (and be an SAA member). We’ll have instructions up next week for how to do that.

Happy editing!

ETA 12/20: The petition will close for editing TONIGHT at 8 PM.

Guest post: What can a new archivists roundtable do?

Here’s another guest post from Rebecca Weintraub, new archivist and Queens College library school student. You can follow her on Twitter @BeckAW and @SAAatQC. 

Okay. So we’ve decided that we want to do this roundtable. We know why. We know for whom. We know what we want to be. We know what we want to call ourselves. Question is…what do we do now? For anyone who has previously attended the annual meeting, you know that roundtables have designated meeting times. There are also activities during the year that go beyond the meeting. What would ours be? What would we do?

In bullet-ish form and in no particular order (or development, for that matter), here are some thoughts:

• The RT should organize/host an orientation or get-together for students, be it their first, second, or third time (and beyond!) at the annual meeting. Individual schools tend to have meet-ups – great for current students and alumni of those schools, but it would be great if all students had the chance to get together and mingle outside of the student poster presentations. It’ll be “Annual Meeting 101”! This could be mixed with an event for new members as well, or as a stand-alone – schedule permitting.
• It would be great to set something up with Mentoring Program. What, exactly, I’m not 100% sure of – but they’re definitely an committee that would be worth collaborating with for obvious reasons.
• Another worthy collaborator would be the people behind the resume review/job search table at the AGM. Again, the specifics elude me here, but I think this is going in the right direction.
• Finding a way of working with other roundtables, especially during the AGM, would definitely be worthwhile. While there are some students and new archivists that know exactly what kind of archive they want to work in (or, perhaps, they are already working in it), there are those who have absolutely no clue. Getting representatives from other roundtables or notable professionals speak to our group while at the meetings would be incredibly informative to those not entirely sure of their direction (not to mention, it’s a great networking opportunity!).
• I’m very much a fan of having a roundtable newsletter. These sorts of entities are great ways for getting both new archivists’ and students’ feet wet in positions within the organization. It would be a forum to discuss issues that impact us (internships, finding that first archives job, etc.) as well as a way for us to keep in touch throughout the year.

These are just five simple ideas. Some, like I’ve said, need a bit more developing – but the idea is there. The only thing we need now? A roundtable!

What do you think? Any other ideas for activities for our roundtable?