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The Society:
From Birth to Maturity
page
5
Introduction
SAA Membership
SAA Leadership (Council & Officers)
Research and Publication
Annual Meeting Analysis
Financial Profile
Presidential Perspective
SAA in a Comparative Context
End Notes
Annual
Meeting Analysis
(Click on
images to enlarge.)
Membership analysis provides a passive picture of the Society--a picture that
features only those who paid dues. The leadership analysis reflects those elected
to positions in the Society--officers, Council members, and Fellows. Such people
are nominated and must be elected. Those who published in the American Archivist
had to have their article approved by the editor and, usually, by additional
outside referees. Between the total membership on the one hand, and its leadership
on the other, there are a number of active professionals who attend meetings,
present papers, and serve on committees. It is useful, therefore, to analyze
the annual meetings to capture this middle level of participation. For the 1940
meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, that task is easy. There were sixty-nine registrants,
of which nearly 70 percent were men. For the seven sessions, twenty-six of the
twenty-nine session presenters or chairs were men--nearly 90 percent. Thus women
were clearly underrepresented on the program, compared with their membership
in the profession or their attendance at the meeting. Staff of the National
Archives predictably dominated the program, followed by employees of colleges
and universities. Among attendees, however, National Archives staff accounted
for only 15 percent, trailing both state archives/libraries and colleges and
universities.14
For 1965, the
data is a bit murkier because the New York meeting was a joint meeting between
SAA and the Association of Records Executives and Administrators (later ARMA).
Nearly three hundred attendees were archivists, of whom a third were women.
Of the sixty-four archival presenters and session chairs, about 85 percent were
men. The largest number of session participants came from federal agencies,
followed by colleges and universities, state archives, corporations, and historical
societies. This pattern is nearly identical to the 1940 meeting.15
The fifty-fourth
meeting of the Society in 1990 was held in Seattle with just over nine hundred
registrants, 55 percent of whom were women. That year's program had 330 session
participants in nearly 94 sessions. There, the breakdown reflected greater participation
by men than women. College and university archivists outnumbered the next largest
group of attendees--state and local archivists--by nearly a four-to-one ratio.
Religious, corporate, and federal government archivists had just under 10 percent
each. College and university archivists represented nearly a third of the session
participants, the largest number by far.16
Throughout these
fifty years, speakers and session content has reflected both the leadership
of the Society and the issues of interest to contemporary archivists. Excluding
the presidential address, there were only seven sessions at the 1940 meeting--none
concurrent. Three of those sessions dealt with Southern themes, reflecting the
location of the meeting, which was held in Montgomery, Alabama. Speakers included
leaders of the first generation of American archivists such as Theodore Schellenberg,
R. D. W. Connor, Theodore Pease, Ernst Posner, and Solon Buck. Prominent historians
included Everett Edwards and Francis Simkins.17
The 1965 program
contained fourteen archival sessions, twice the number as in 1940, plus eight
sessions sponsored by the Association of Records Executives and Administrators.
The three-day program included two to three concurrent sessions for each time
slot. Sessions were dominated by the second generation of archival leaders and
covered a range of topics: college and university archives (Herbert Finch, Philip
Mason, and Robert Warner), state and local archives (Gerald Ham, H. G. Jones,
and Charles Lee), religious archives (Augie Suelflow and Nelle Bellamy), records
management (Frank Evans, William Rofes, and Everett Alldredge), manuscripts
(Josephine Harper and Ruth Bordin), and historical records (Elizabeth Hamer,
Philip Brooks, and Luther Evans).18
The Society's
fifty-fourth annual meeting in 1990 ran for four-and-a-half days, including
three days of concurrent sessions. The Society's size and diversity required
a more complex organizational structure, including functional and employer-based
sections, topical roundtables, committees, task forces, and ad hoc groups. Programs
reflected a similar diversity in structure. While most sessions followed the
traditional pattern of scholarly association meetings--one or two formal presentations,
followed by a commentary--the Program accommodated a wider range of formats
designed to meet increasingly diverse members' needs and interests, including:
- work-in-progress
presentations, offering speakers a forum for presenting tentative findings
at a stage where audience feedback would be especially valuable.
- limited-enrollment
sessions, those involving extensive interaction among participants or the
use of a demonstration which would be ineffective with a large audience.
- special focus
sessions designed to highlight innovative archival programs or new techniques
for the profession.
- pre-conference
workshops coordinated by the Society's Education office.
Even more striking
is the shift in program emphasis evident at the 1990 meeting, with over ninety
sessions, averaging ten concurrent sessions for each program slot. While a few
sessions focused on business, religious, or college and university archives
or traditional functional areas such as acquisitions and reference, archivists
were mainly concerned about issues that were either never or rarely discussed
twenty-five years earlier. The largest number of sessions--nearly 15 percent--dealt
with preservation, followed by electronic issues (either records or software
to manage archival information), and documentation issues. Other areas with
multiple sessions included legal/ethical issues, appraisal, education, and standards.19
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