Contributed by Laurie Rizzo, Hagley Museum and Library, DVAG Vice Chair
In April, I attended the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) in Erie, PA. For those of you who could not make it, I would like to tell you a bit about what you missed. In a three-part series of posts, I will discuss the conference and some of the sessions I attended. I thought I would start with an update about MARAC, generally.
Outgoing MARAC Chair, Ed Galloway has been working on forming a consortium of regional archival associations. At this point there are nine representatives from six regional associations working together to determine membership, governance and purpose. The hope is to improve communication and facilitate collaboration between the various groups. This is a result of a Regional Summit that occurred at the last Society of American Archivists annual meeting. I see a lot of potential in this development and look forward to hearing more from them.
Since I mentioned the “outgoing,” I should also mention the “incoming.” MARAC has a new Chair, John LoGloahec, from NARA in College Park, MD! For those of you not acquainted with John, he is a wonderful person and will do a great job for MARAC. As you know, MARAC is an all-volunteer organization, if you are interested in being involved in MARAC in some way feel free to express your interest to John. His contact information, along with all of those currently serving on committees can be found on the MARAC website.
Other ways to get involved with MARAC are to write for the Blog (http://marac-blog.blogspot.com/) or to write an article for the Mid-Atlantic Archivist (MAA) publication (http://www.marac.info/publications). MARAC welcomes your contributions and would love to see increased dialog from you on their blog and more articles on archival topics in the MAA.
MARAC’s institutional repository, called DRUM, is up and running (http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/12510). It is hosted by the University of Maryland, which is also the repository of the MARAC archives.
There has been ongoing analysis of the Membership Survey which was distributed in March 2012. Out of 40 questions 4 were free response; as you can imagine there is a lot of additional coding and analysis required. The Membership Development Committee is working on this analysis, and results will be made available to members as available. There will be links to results of the membership survey on the MARAC website, as well as more information on this to come as well.
It was announced that Holly Ott, MARAC Administrator has resigned, effective August 2013. Holly will be pursuing her doctorate at Penn State University and we all wish her the best. For those of you who have joined MARAC in the past four years like I have, it is hard to imagine MARAC without Holly! At Erie, we thanked Holly with flowers and a standing ovation during the Business meeting. Holly gave some warm remarks about her experience working with MARAC. The search committee hopes to find Holly’s replacement to continue work out of the Dickinson College office by July so that there will be overlap for the incoming MARAC Administrators training.
UPCOMING CONFERENCES:
The next MARAC conference is November 7-9, 2013 in our very own great city, Philadelphia, at the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing! I hope that you all can make it and look forward to seeing you there! (Of course, I also look forward to seeing you all at the next DVAG meeting, which will be at the Curtis Music Institute in June – more details on this to come!)
The Spring 2014 conference will be April 24-26, 2014 in Rochester, New York! Followed by Fall 2014, to be held October 16-18 in Baltimore, Maryland; and Spring 2015 Meeting with New England Archivists, date, time and location TBA.
Delaware Valley Archivists Group 