Check out this blog post from SGA member, Elaine Slayton, the Archivist for Riverside Avondale Preservation !

Back to School, Back in Time

It’s hard to believe it is mid-August, especially as we have had an unusually cool and rainy summer. Nevertheless, school is starting up and we are on our way to the fall season. 

And fall means that the SGA Annual Conference is just around the corner! This year we are trying something a little different. Instead of the usual multi-day format, we are condensing the conference into one day jam-packed with great sessions. We decided to modify the format to make the conference more affordable and accessible for our membership, especially our student members or those with financial challenges. The Program Committee responded to the call from the membership for a conference program emphasizing basic and practical archival skills. Mark your calendars now for Thursday October 7 when we go “Back to Basics” at our wonderful conference venue at Middle Georgia State University, where SGA is “Macon” it happen! It is exciting to see the conference come together – kudos to the Program and Local Arrangements committees for all their hard work. This year we are offering separate registration for the Keynote so that we can offer this as a virtual presentation. Our Keynote speakers are Invisible Histories cofounders Joshua Burford and Dr. Maigen Sullivan. Invisible Histories is a 501(c)3 community-based archive that provides educational resources and professional development for 13 southern states. Their mission is to locate, collect, research, and create community-based educational programming around LGBTQ history in the Deep South. 

Register for the meeting AND the keynote here: https://soga.org/annualmeeting. You won’t want to miss either of these!

Educational Events and Facility Tours

“Community Archives From the Ground Up” was the theme for a workshop held in June at the Georgia Tech Library, with guest presenter James Newberry, Director of Special Projects in the Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books at Kennesaw State University. If you missed the workshop, you’ll have another opportunity to participate next month. Two pre-conference workshops are in the works (scheduled for September 29th and 30th), one of which will consider best practices for working with oral histories, and the other on aspects of digital preservation. Stay tuned and be sure to take advantage of these special educational opportunities!

The SGA Outreach Committee has been busy creating wonderful tours for SGA members, including most recently a tour of Emory and Georgia Tech’s shared Library Services Center. Earlier this year, SGA members enjoyed going behind the scenes at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution Archives in Midtown in April, and Emory’s Pitts Theology Library and Rose Library in June, in conjunction with the Georgia Archives Institute reception at the Pitts Library. In May, SGA members enjoyed a tour of “Defining Skylines: John Portman and the Architectural Evolution of Downtown Atlanta” at the Georgia Tech Library.

Archives Night at the Fox Theatre

I had the privilege of tabling for SGA at the Fox Theatre’s Fourth Annual Archives Night event on Sunday, August 11. Who doesn’t love the Fabulous Fox and its fascinating history? It was wonderful to see fellow SGA members Paul Crater from the Atlanta History Center, Josh Kitchens (in his role as archival consultant to the Fox) and Eli Arnold, University Librarian and Archivist at Oglethorpe University and to hear how together they helped to preserve the documentary history of the Fox Theatre. To find out more about Archives Night at the Fox, check out this blog post: https://sogablog.org/2022/07/.

These are just some of the many ways SGA is working for the membership to foster a sense of community and life-long learning. And as always, if you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make SGA better, please reach out and let me know.

Enjoy the rest of the summer, and I hope to see you in Macon in October!