Past Conferences: 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011
In 2020, SOA held two virtual conferences and a workshop. Scroll down for descriptions, and recordings and slides (where available). Session summaries for the spring meeting can be found in the fall 2020 Ohio Archivist.
SOA 2020 meetings: Spring Workshop | Annual Meeting | Joint Fall Meeting
Joint OLHA/SOA Fall Meeting: History is Happening Now (Virtual)
Join SOA and the Ohio Local History Association for our joint fall meeting, October 1-3, 2020.
This is OLHA’s annual meeting with the addition of a SOA track on Thursday & Friday, serving as SOA’s fall conference. Come for SOA’s sessions or come for the entire conference! This year, registration covers the full conference including the keynote, “The Urgency of Now: Taking Risks to Serve Your Community” with Melanie Adams, Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
Registration:
– Register online through September 25 extended through Wednesday September 30! or download a form to print and mail.
– Fees: Member (SOA/OLHA) $40; Nonmember $50; Student/Unemployed/Furloughed $20.
– This year, all registrations are for the full conference.
– Cancellations for a full refund must be made before Sept 25, 5pm.
Access: All sessions will be held using the Zoom meeting and webinar platform. During the week prior to the meeting, all registered participants will be emailed a copy of the program which will include individual links for each session.
Program: For the full program see http://www.ohiolha.org/what-we-do/alliance-annual-meeting/ or download the program brochure.
Hashtag: SOA’s hashtag #soafm20 / OLHA hashtag #OLHAEmpowers
Questions? Contact the Committee Cochairs Rachael Bussert and William Modrow.
SCHEDULE
SOA TRACK – Thursday Oct 1
9:00-10:00am – Building a Community Photo Album
The Community Photo Album at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library is an endeavor to create a submission path by which the public can contribute born-digital content in a democratized fashion, while attempting to remove institutional bias. Topics covered: mission and purpose, workflow, submission agreement, metadata, access, sustainability, and outreach.
Presenter: John Dewees, Toledo Lucas County Public Library
10:30-11:30am – #TogetherApart: Processing a Pandemic in the Kenyon Community
While working from home in spring 2020, the Kenyon College Special Collections and Archives staff created a community-sourced project to document personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Archiving Kenyon’s COVID-19 Story project reached out to students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and more, to collect a range of digital materials to eventually become part of a public-facing collection in the institutional repository, Digital Kenyon.
Presenter: Abigail Tayse, Kenyon College
2:30-3:30pm – Safety First: Prioritizing Safe Practices for Conservation
Archives and special collections aren’t usually considered dangerous. Yet, conservation labs, with their knives, equipment, and chemicals, can become an accident waiting to happen. How can we create a safe environment for ourselves and our students? Though conservation labs pose obvious hazards, this session will address lessons that practitioners from other specialties can apply to their own environments.
Presenter: Kim Hoffman, Miami University
SOA TRACK – Friday Oct 2
9:00-10:00am – Let’s Try This Again: Revamping Oral History at Warren County
In 2017, The Warren County Records Center and Archives launched an Oral History Program to get personal recollections while doing research for an upcoming exhibit on the historic Silver Street jail. Coming up short with only one interview, they overhauled and widened the program in 2019 to include interviews with former Warren County employees, retired elected officials and individuals with connections to the Old Jail, Children’s Home and Infirmary. With plenty of bumps along the way, here is how we revamped our program and how an organization can learn from our mistakes. This is an expansion on their presentation from the SOA/ALAO SCAig Spring 2020 workshop.
Presenters: Jenifer Baker and Jen Haney Conover, Warren County Records Center and Archives
10:30-11:30am – Restoring the Past for the Future
In 2019, Licking County Records and Archives took on the task of cleaning and preserving historical records that had been neglected for decades in a courthouse attic. With help from an Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board grant, the department developed a plan and managed to salvage more than 200 records for generations to come. This project resulted in a 2020 SOA Merit Award.
Presenters: Abigail Holman, Corinne Johnson, and Sophia McGuire, Licking County Records Center and Archives
2020 Annual Meeting: Archiving 100 Years of Change – June 16–17 (Virtual)
Annual Meeting Info: REGISTRATION | PLENARY | SCHEDULE
SOA has moved its annual conference online! Join us Tuesday, June 16–Wednesday, June 17, 2020, for our virtual conference, Archiving 100 Years of Change.
Recordings available on SOA’s YouTube as a playlist. Slides are linked below in the Schedule at a Glance.
Thank you to our sponsor Hollinger Metal Edge!
Questions? Please contact Society of Ohio Archivists’ Educational Programming Committee Cochairs Stephanie Bricking or William Modrow
Registration
Registration Deadline: Thursday, June 11, Sunday, June 14, or until at capacity Updated
Annual Meeting Registration
- Annual Meeting Fee: FREE for all SOA members (if not currently a member you will have the opportunity to join SOA through the meeting registration form by choosing within the Registration Type menu.)
- Annual Meeting Registration Link: closed
Plenary-Only Registration
- Plenary-Only Registration Fee: FREE and open to the public, but registration is required. A link to the online Zoom webinar will be sent to you on Monday, June 15.
- Plenary-Only Registration Link: closed
2020 Annual Meeting Plenary Speaker: Kimberly Hamlin “Finding Sex, Race, and Suffrage in the Archives: What I Found When I Looked for Helen Hamilton Gardener in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Collections”
Kimberly A. Hamlin, PhD is an award-winning historian, speaker, and writer. Her book, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener reveals the fascinating story of the “fallen woman” who reinvented herself and became the “most potent factor” in Congressional passage of the 19th Amendment. Free Thinker received support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award and the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics.
Appointed to the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer Bureau, Hamlin speaks about the history of women, gender, and sex across the country. A regular contributor to the Washington Post, Hamlin’s research has also been featured in NPR and CBC radio, Vice, qz.com, among other outlets, and she has contributed to several PBS documentaries. Hamlin is currently helping to organize commemorations of the 2020 suffrage centennial, and she serves as historical consultant to the Bearded Lady Project, now on view at the National Museum of Natural History. Hamlin lives in Cincinnati, where she cohosts the Mercantile Library’s “Women You Should Know” Book Series and teaches at Miami University in Oxford. Visit www.kimberlyhamlin.com or @ProfessorHamlin on Twitter for more.
Plenary speaker is made possible in part by Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 
SCHEDULE
Recordings available on SOA’s YouTube. Slides are linked below in the Schedule at a Glance.
Full program (download PDF)
Schedule at a Glance
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
– 9:00am-10:00am – Welcome / Plenary: “Finding Sex, Race, and Suffrage in the Archives: What I Found When I Looked for Helen Hamilton Gardener in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Collections.” Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University. [SLIDES (sources only) Q&A (additional)] Plenary is FREE and open to the public, as part of the Ohio Humanities speakers bureau program. See Registration section above on how to register.
– 10:00am-10:30am – Break
– 10:30am-11:30am – Digitizing Community Collections. Cindy Lindsay, Aaron O’Donovan, Angela O’Neal, Nicole Sutton, Columbus Metropolitan Library [SLIDES]
– 11:30am-12:30pm – Lunch Break
– 12:30pm-1:30pm – Sharing Initial Steps on a Digital Preservation Policy. Brittany Hayes, Zoe Orcutt, University of Akron; Sidney Gao, James Van Mil, University of Cincinnati [SLIDES (Google) (PDF)]
– 1:30pm-2:00pm – Break
– 2:00pm-3:00pm – Oberlin’s Co-education and Suffrage: A Legacy of Leadership. Ken Grossi, Alexia Hudson-Ward, Heath Patten, Oberlin College [SLIDES]
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
– 9:00am-10:00am – Crash and Burn: Learning from Failure. Sarah Aisenbrey, Sisters of the Precious Blood [SLIDES]; Collette McDonough, Kettering Foundation [SLIDES]; Tina Ratcliff, Montgomery County Records Center & Archives; Amy Rohmiller, University of Dayton [SLIDES]; Adam Wanter, MidPointe Library System [SLIDES]
– 10:00am-10:30am – Break
– 10:30am-11:30am – The Digital Helen Keller Archive Education Project: Teaching a Fully Accessible Online Collection. Elizabeth Neal and Helen Selsdon, American Foundation for the Blind [SLIDES]
– 11:30am-12:30pm – Lunch Break
– 12:30pm-1:30pm – Experiencing War: A Project to Preserve and Make Accessible Oral Histories of World War II. Nick Pavlik and Michelle Sweetser, Bowling Green State University [SLIDES]
– 1:30pm-2:00pm – Break
– 2:00pm-2:30pm – Closing – All are welcome to join us in recognizing award winners and newly elected members of SOA Council.
Posters
Getting Your Community Involved With Collection Building
John Dewees, Toledo Lucas County Public Library. Download PDF poster.
The goal of this project is to build a program for collecting photographic content from the public to enable community-driven collection of born-digital content. The formulation of this program is designed to require essentially no resources and provide a basis on which outreach and programming can easily be built as an ideal “test and try” project. Visit the Toledo Lucas County Public Library Community Photo Album.
SOA/ALAO SCAig Joint Spring Workshop (Virtual) – May 14, 2020
Workshop: Opening Doors: Outreach with Archives and Special Collections
Great news! Our joint Society of Ohio Archivists/Special Collections & Archives interest group (SCAig) of ALAO workshop has moved online!
Recording is now available at https://youtu.be/sK1WvKwUxoU
Date/Time: Thursday, May 14, 2020, 10:00 am-12:00 pm
Place: Live online with Zoom
Cost: FREE but limited to 80 participants! (Will be recorded)
FULL! Register at https://www.alaoweb.org/event-3802866
Hashtag #soasw2020 & Wakelet (collection of Tweets).
Description
After a history of closed doors and limited access, outreach has become essential to getting the public engaged with special collections and archives. This workshop will address the various ways that archivists and special collections librarians can better reach out to our user communities and cultivate new ones. Our five presenters represent several different types of archives or special collections libraries: academic libraries, government records centers, and local historical societies. They will each will discuss their outreach efforts and provide their tips and tricks for improving your outreach efforts, no matter the size of your institution and staff.
Note: This workshop had previously been scheduled as an in-person preconference to the SOA Annual Meeting.
Presentations
Is That Account Really Necessary? Thinking Differently about Social Media in Libraries and Archives. [SLIDES]
Steve Ammidown, Browne Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University
Some libraries and archives have found social media to be an invaluable tool to reach both current and potential stakeholders, patrons and researchers. Many other institutions have struggled to gain traction on social platforms despite their concerted efforts. The difference between success and failure on social media can come down to a combination of factors such as available time, brand, and the difference between expected and actual audiences. Using examples from different platforms to highlight both mistakes and best practices, this presentation will discuss what makes for successful library and archives social media, as well as how to tell when it might be time to delete an account.
Let’s Try this Again: Revamping Oral History at Warren County. [SLIDES]
Jenifer Baker and Jen Haney Conover, Warren County Records Center and Archives
In 2017, The Warren County Records Center and Archives launched an Oral History Program to get personal recollections while doing research for an upcoming exhibit on the historic Silver Street jail. Coming up short with only one interview, they overhauled and widened the program in 2019 to include interviews with former Warren County employees, retired elected officials and individuals with connections to the Old Jail, Children’s Home and Infirmary. With plenty of bumps along the way, here is how we revamped our program and how an organization can learn from our mistakes.
Sharing Time: Carving Out a Space for Collections Outreach. [SLIDES]
Natalie Fritz, Clark County Historical Society at the Heritage Center
At a county non-profit historical society with a small paid staff that relies heavily on volunteers, outreach opportunities are often based around working with whatever is available using the least amount of additional effort. For an organization that has spent a good chunk of the last year with more limited access to collections, first due to the aftermath of a catastrophic pipe burst and now due to temporary closure because of COVID-19 precautions, it is more vital than ever to work with what is readily available and to find new ways to reach both a broader online audience and the local community. Natalie will share some of the challenges and unique opportunities connected with outreach at the Clark County Historical Society and lead an exercise that will challenge participants to think outside the box to work with what they have to brainstorm outreach ideas.
Outreach in a Time of Overwhelm: How Can We Maintain (or Gain!) Momentum? [SLIDES]
Miriam Intrator, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries
The title of this presentation reflects a question that I have been constantly asking myself since I began working from home on March 16th. I know I am not alone in having had virtually all class sessions and other events cancelled for at least the rest of the semester. I also know I am not alone in not wanting to “bother” faculty with emails, even emails in which I am offering solutions for remote primary source instruction and virtual resource ideas. At the same time, I still feel passionately about my job, about the collection for which I am responsible, and about introducing faculty, students, and others to those materials in any way that I can. Moving that connection-making out of the classroom or reading room and onto a screen is possibly the biggest challenge of my career thus far, one that I find intimidating and draining, but also inspiring and motivating. In this presentation I will share my constantly evolving and very much in-progress thinking about outreach and actions taken and planned under COVID-19 lockdown, and hope that we can have a discussion in which you will do the same!
For 2020 questions contact: Stephanie Bricking ([email protected]) or William Modrow ([email protected]), Cochairs, Society of Ohio Archivists’ Educational Programming Committee.
Last Updated on December 6, 2022 by janet_carleton