By Ashley Gosselar
Image credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash.
September can feel like a new beginning. It’s the start of a new school year, the start of a new season, and it is the start of a new leadership year for SAA.
As outgoing Chair of the Description Section Steering Committee, I am proud of all that we have accomplished as a section this past year and I anticipate another year ahead of thoughtful, engaging programming with our new Chair, Will Clements, at the helm.
The Description Section has been skillfully led by seven people this year. I extend warm thanks to Vice Chair/Chair Elect, Will Clements; Immediate Past Chair and Lead Blog Editor, Kate Madison; Secretary, Phoebe Nobles; Members-at-Large, Betts Coup and Kate Morris; and Web Liaison, Scott Kirycki. I am also grateful to our Ex Officio members, Greg Wiedeman and Regine Heberlein (co-chairs of TS-DACS), and our SAA Council Liaison, Stephen Curley, for supporting the work of our section.
Together, this dedicated group of people has wisely leveraged partnerships across SAA to accomplish a lot this year.
In January, we were proud to announce that SAA Council endorsed the “Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Anti-Racist Description Resources” as an external description standard. The standard “offers metadata recommendations for archival professionals to address racist, particularly anti-Black, archival description, in order to assist archivists who handle collections about, by, and for people of the Black diaspora that are often held at predominantly white institutions.” With the Description Section’s support, an External Standards Working Group collaborated with the A4BLiP Working Group to develop and submit this successful proposal in late 2022.
In addition to the A4BLiP collaboration, our section supported the Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (TS-DACS), which is hard at work on its Principles Project, as well as the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards (TS-EAS), which is working on EAD4. This spring, we partnered with TS-EAS on a three-part webinar series about controlled vocabularies. The series reviewed how to use controlled vocabularies for describing archival collections, relevant encoding options, and the application of controlled vocabularies with an inclusive description lens. The webinars were attended live by hundreds of people from around the globe, and the recordings are available through SAA’s YouTube channel.
Our Section’s blog, Descriptive Notes, has become a powerful tool for amplifying the work of archival description. Since last September, the blog has published 23 posts submitted by our section’s members on topics ranging from inclusive description, to project management, to conference dispatches. Together, these posts have made our “invisible labor” visible to over 16,000 readers from 53 countries. Please continue to pitch ideas to the blog’s editorial team, led by Kate Madison!
The outgoing Description Section Steering Committee welcomed 89 attendees to our section’s annual meeting on June 26th. Attendees heard a recap of 2022-2023 section business that included a program on the A4BLiP standard, updates on ongoing projects, and news about Description Section Steering Committee elections. In addition, representatives from SAA Council, TS-DACS, TS-EAS, and Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) provided updates on their groups’ activities. If you were unable to attend the meeting live, a recording of the meeting is freely available.
I look forward to all that our vibrant, active section will do in the new SAA year. Your 2023-2024 Steering Committee is as follows:
- Will Clements, Chair
- Betts Coup, Vice Chair/Chair-Elect
- Ashley Gosselar, Immediate Past Chair
- Phoebe Nobles, Secretary
- Scott Kirycki, Web Liaison
- Kate Madison, Blog Editor
- Kate Morris, Member-at-Large
- Corey Cherrington, Member-at-Large
You can expect to hear more soon from Steering about our ongoing work to update the list of inclusive description resources in the Description Section’s Documentation Portal. In the meantime, we welcome your ideas. We meet regularly throughout the year, typically on a bi-monthly basis, so there are frequent opportunities to discuss new ideas and opportunities. Here’s to new beginnings!
Ashley Gosselar is Immediate Past Chair of the Description Section and works as a processing archivist at the University of Chicago Library.
Descriptive Notes 