Hi everyone,

The Society of Southwest Archivists is currently accepting session proposals for its 2015 annual meeting, to be held in Arlington, Texas from May 20-23, 2015. I plan to submit a proposal for a paper with the tentative title, “Victims of Success: Managing the Consequences of Digital Outreach." In it, I plan to discuss the experiences of the Louisiana Research Collection in managing a huge increase in remote reference requests in recent years. I will discuss the correlation between this influx of reference traffic and my institution’s push for increased discoverability via digitization and online finding aids, and will suggest potential ways to deal with increased reference traffic in a time when most institutions are understaffed and underfunded.

I propose a session on centered broadly on issues of archival reference, access, and outreach, and am soliciting one or two additional papers/participants. I’m happy to be flexible in adjusting the session’s broader topic in order to fit your paper ideas.

The deadline for SSA session proposals is Thursday, November 27, 2014. If you’d like to work with me on this session by submitting a proposed paper, please respond by Tuesday, November 25 at the latest. I can be reached at sbenjam@tulane.edu. I look forward to hearing from you!

Best,

Sean

Sean Benjamin

Public Services Librarian | Louisiana Research Collection | Howard-Tilton Memorial Library Room 202 Jones Hall | 6801 Freret St. | Tulane University | New Orleans, LA 70118 | 504-865-5608

http://larc.tulane.edu/  | http://manuscriptstulane.blogspot.com/  | http://twitter.com/LA_Research