October is American Archives Month and the Advocacy and Outreach Committee would like to take the opportunity to highlight and celebrate archives all throughout Ohio!

Update: We are canceling the behind-the-scenes virtual Zoom tours for this year. With all that is going on in the world, and our late start, we weren’t able to get enough sign-ups. We have high hopes for next year, and plan to make these behind-the-scenes “crawls” a regular part of our Archives Month promotions in future years.

In the meantime, please see the virtual archives tours from our June Annual Meeting. This session, now on SOA’s YouTube, featured Miami University with Rachel Makarowski and Candace Pine; University of Dayton with Amy Rohmiller and Kristina Schulz; and the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions with Gino Pasi.

Ways to celebrate Archives Month

Hold an Event: If your archive site hasn’t made plans yet to do something to celebrate and acknowledge Archives Month, we encourage you to hold some sort of event (in person or virtual) to let people get to know your archives!

Let us know: If you already have something planned (like an open house, talk, etc.), please share the details so that we can publish a list of Ohio Archives Month activities around the state on the SOA website. You can send event details to Advocacy and Outreach Committee Cochair Natalie Fritz.

Download and display this year’s Archives Month in Ohio poster, Ohio’s Wonderland: Unboxing The Great Outdoors. (Coming soon: a post from A&O on the making of the poster and the great submissions from archives around the state.)

This year, the Society of Ohio Archivists Advocacy and Outreach Committee would like to offer a few virtual opportunities in October to invite the public “in” to our archives.

We have set up four dates on Tuesday afternoons in October to allow Ohio archival repositories to sign up to give a brief virtual tour during a one-hour Zoom meeting. This is a chance to show off your place, your coolest things, whatever you’d like!

• The one-hour Zoom meetings are on Tuesdays. October 5th and 19th are at 12:15 pm, and October 12 and 26 are at 2:15pm.
• Each Tuesday time slot can have up to 6 archives providing a tour, giving 8-10 minutes per archive (pre-recorded or live–your choice!).
• (Multiple employees/representatives from an archive are welcome to attend the Zoom where your organization will be featured.)
• Sign up for your preferred date and tour time using the form here: https://cutt.ly/OhioArchiveTours.
• After signing up, you’ll receive the link for your date.
• We’ll share a graphic/flyer that can be shared with details of how the public can join each session.
• In addition, organizational representatives can join to watch and chat/ask questions on any of the other dates if they just want to see other archives!
• See the virtual tours from our June Annual Meeting.

This is a fun opportunity for us archivists too, not just the public! We hope you can join any of the days available!

Last Updated on December 13, 2022 by janet_carleton