From the Chair Stephen Fletcher UNC Chapel Hill (Feb 2010)

Think Globally, Meet Locally?

The Visual Materials Section Midwinter Meeting Revisited. In January, 2003, twenty Visual Material Section members traveled to University Park, Maryland, for our section’s first Midwinter Meeting. It was the culmination of more than ten years of discussion about how to accomplish the business of the section in a way impossible to accomplish within the tight confines of the SAA Annual Meeting structure.

The meeting was successful; as then Section Chair Laurie Baty reported in Views, “I easily can say that we left the meeting re-energized and committed to increasing our volunteer base, improving our work with Council on visual archival education, and in providing up-to-date information and information resources in Views and on our Web site. We were also exhausted from two very full days of considering Section activities.”

During this economically challenging time, I am concerned about people’s ability to travel to Midwinter, and as I began thinking about where to meet for this year, I became curious about past meetings and their attendance records. A little digging revealed some interesting numbers. Of the twenty attendees for the first Midwinter Meeting, thirteen were from the immediate Washington, D.C. area and three lived as close as an eight-hour drive. Only three Section members visited from afar.

After its initial success in 2003, as an informal trial, SAA sanctioned Midwinter as an official meeting, which enabled participants to be reimbursed by their employers if applicable. This seemed to have little effect, however, on travelers. Seventeen Section members attended the 2004 meeting in Boston, but again only three archivists made a trip farther than a day’s drive.

The third Midwinter Meeting returned to University Park, with sixteen attendees,and once again there were only three “distance” travelers. For 2006, in San Francisco, the first Midwinter meeting away from the East Coast, only ten participants were on hand, four being from the West Coast. The 2007 meeting in Durham, North Carolina, saw an even smaller gathering of seven, only two of whom traveled from the West Coast, with the balance being from the Carolinas or nearby Kentucky. The 2008 meeting had to be cancelled,but last year’s return to Maryland saw a rebound to twelve attendees—but again all were local, or nearby, save one long-distance traveler.