Well, or as good as it can be when you’re in the underground maze of the Hilton Chicago basement meeting spaces!

This was my triumphant-ish return to SAA; I haven’t been since 2018, I believe, a surprisingly long hiatus! That explains how physical I found the conference – I found myself back in my room and ready for bed at an alarmingly early hour every night. As is my norm, I tried to get out of the conference bubble every day, whether it was to get coffee or lunch or a pre-session walk one morning out to a beautiful fountain that I’d never heard of! But you’re not here to learn how I bobbed and weaved to find the best coffee with the shortest line every day – let’s talk takeaways! I attended sessions that were marked as only in-person – we’ll see if I can make it back to recordings of hybrid or fully online sessions.

• As always, SAA for me is as much about relationships as content. I met some new folks attending tours – I arrived just in time to get out to Oak Park and visit the Oak Park Public Library (home to a portfolio of rare FLW sketches) and the Frank Lloyd Wright House and Museum – as well as sessions, since many of the ones that I attended had small group or other interactive components. I also saw old friends and made some new ones at a meetup celebrating the award-winning A Green New Deal for Archives publication and at the Simmons University SILS mixer, which is great for making connections with grad school classmates as well as talking with newer alumni and students. Fellow alum and former Archivist of the US David Ferriero put in an appearance in his trademark seersucker suit, too!
• One of the best articles I read last year was Defining Archival Debt: Building New Futures for Archives (co-authored by former Visiting archivist Audra Eagle Yun!) so I was geared up to attend “So Close, Yet So Far Away: Confronting Archival Debt in Siloed Workspaces.” My takeaway was that collective problems can still manage to isolate us and the best way to bridge that is by reaching out with curiosity and looking for ways to communicate and partner up on projects and issues.
• Towards the end of “Political Narratives: Exploring the Many Narratives in Political Papers” a panelist posed the questions: what does it mean to document America, and to see the world through the collections of people that hold power? What compelling and provocative (positive) questions to ask, especially in an election year.
• The session “Indigenous Inclusivity=Archival Reciprocity: PNAAM Implementation through Indigenous Relationship Building” was a rich resource in thinking about how to seek out culturally sensitive materials even when unfamiliar with the specific culture – the presenters had a long list of types of items that should be flagged as maybe not needing to be available institutionally. We have a small amount of Cherokee materials, related to former president James Ralph Scales, whose father was an enrolled Cherokee member; but paying more attention to sensitive materials from many cultures is an important part of the curatorial and appraisal work of archivists, so I found this session relevant and applicable.
• A very funny presenter from REI – in a great presentation on storytelling and brand collaboration, “The Co-op Living Archive: Understanding the
  Past to Shape the Future. Was it About the Ice Axe or Creating Access?” – mentioned a wardrobe aesthetic called “Gorp Core” (I’m assuming a very specific type of “Norm Core” in the Core taxonomy??) and the whole audience cackled.
• Another corporate highlight was learning about the Johnson Publishing Company and its archives – JPC were publishers of Ebony and JET among other Black-focused magazines. The sheer volume of archival processing work that has been undertaken in a joint project between the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History is astounding! And the photo/slide images included in the presentation were sooooo good – much of the JPC image collection did not appear in print, so I’m looking forward to the world diving into it.

That’s it from me! Lou Malnati’s gluten-free deep dish didn’t hold a candle to Mellow Mushroom’s gluten-free regular dish, but otherwise it was a successful meeting all around, especially once I was able to come home and enjoy a full night’s sleep! Send a meeting planner on down if you want to talk about any of these projects or my gluten-free product reviews 🙂