News & announcements

Are you interested in attending the Midwest Archives Conference Annual Meeting, May 14-16, 2026?  If you have never attended a Midwest Archives Conference annual meeting, you are eligible for the Mark A. Greene Award for First-Time Meeting Attendees. Both professionals and students are invited to apply for $250 or $500 of financial support to attend this year’s meeting in Columbus, Ohio, from May 14 to 16. MAC membership is not required.

Registration rates, hotel information, and the conference program are available now on the MAC website. Successful applications reference specific workshops and sessions that support applicants’ professional development and address financial barriers to attending the meeting. Applications are due on Monday, March 16, 2026.

BPE 2026 Registration Open!

Registration is now open for the Best Practices Exchange (Un)Conference, which will be held May 18-20, 2026, at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University Indianapolis (in downtown Indianapolis, IN). 

Please follow this link for more information about registering for the 2026 Best Practices Exchange. Space is limited, so don’t delay! 

View the schedule and session descriptions, now available online: Program & Schedule

Best Practices Exchange (BPE) is a community of practitioners who manage digital information that meets annually to share our experiences and have honest conversations about the work that we do. This conference is a great opportunity to share, question, and learn from colleagues across a spectrum of government, academic, and cultural organizations. See the 2026 Conference page for more information.

Questions? Email us at bestpracticesexchange@gmail.com 

Social Networks and Archival Contexts (SNAC) is a free, online resource that helps users discover primary source documents, such as photographs, letters, and sound recordings, from all over the world and connections across time and place.

The SNAC State of the Cooperative, our annual meeting, makes a comeback this Spring after a brief hiatus and some restructuring. We are planning a program chocked full of news, plans and recaps of our productive 2025 and what's to come in 2026 and beyond! This year we are planning to open the event to broader networks and have decided to open the event to the public. Visit our website to learn more about SNAC, or get a brief intro by watching this video.

Our program is still being conceived, but we have exciting updates about our #IndigenizeSNAC projects including information about our Mellon grant, exciting cultural-technical news, and more.

When: March 11, 2026, 1-4 pm EST

Where: Virtual

Cost: FREE!

Registration: SNAC State of the Cooperative 2026

APPLY for NWA Awards by April 15, see  Northwest Archivists, Inc. - Scholarships & Funding for more information.

• STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP ($1000) - Grad. students living in/attending school in PNW
• PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ($1000) – Individual Members

Through a collaborative effort of the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands & Peoples of the North American West, the Archives and Special Collections (ASC) department of the MSU Library, and the Friends of MSU Library , Montana State University offers a $3,000 annual award to facilitate research into collections held by ASC.  

The award is intended to defray the costs of either travel to Bozeman to conduct research; to facilitate digitization of portions of a collection to allow a researcher to work remotely; or a mix of the two. Recipients may be academics (including graduate students) or independent scholars who are residents of the United States. We are unable to pay for any costs above the award amount. 

Send applications to the Head of Archives and Special Collections, Jodi Allison-Bunnell (jodi.allisonbunnell@montana.edu) by April 1, 2026.  

For full information on application criteria and other details, see https://www.lib.montana.edu/archives/news-and-events/dcta-award.html

The Western Archives Institute (WAI) returns July 20-31, 2026 for an intensive, two-week online program that offers integrated instruction in basic archival practices through a diverse curriculum of synchronous sessions that will be led by the principal faculty member, Dr. Christopher (Chris) Prom. Dr. Prom currently serves as the Coordinator of Sponsored Research Development and Acting Head of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has extensive experience in archives, has taught several courses for the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and was recognized as an SAA Fellow in 2010 for his contributions to the organization and archives profession.

Apply for WAI Here! (Application Deadline is April 10, 2026)

Visit our website for further details about the program and to sign up for an upcoming WAI Information Session.

For any questions about the application, applicant qualifications, or the review process, please contact the WAI Administrator,  Marcella Lees, at wai@calarchivists.org.

The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) invites proposals for the 2026 BitCurator Forum to be held virtually on June 17th, 2026. An international, community-led organization representing 31 member organizations, the BCC promotes and supports the application of free and open-source digital archives tools and practices in libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations.

The 2026 conference theme, Hitting Reset, reflects the challenges and changes of the past several years and the importance of pausing to reflect on our practices before moving forward. This theme invites us to reassess how we work, what we prioritize, and how we adapt in a rapidly evolving professional landscape. Hitting Reset also encourages us to respond intentionally to new opportunities, expanding responsibilities, and changing environments.

Within the context of digital archives tools and practices, how are you “hitting reset” in areas including, but not limited to, the following?

We welcome proposals that explore reflection, reinvention, and practical approaches to moving forward with intention.

This year’s call is for 5 or 10 minute “lightning talks.” Lightning talks are a great format for case studies, digital archives “success stories” or “tales of woe,” research updates, practices and procedures, and short demos or how-tos. Options include:

·  One presenter for 5 minutes 

·  Up to two presenters for 10 minutes

The Forum Committee welcomes participation from organizations and individuals working outside of academic and special collections libraries and archives, members from BIPOC communities, students, and new professionals.

For more information, see the Call for Proposals page on our website.

Submission deadline: Sunday, March 8th, 2026

The BitCurator Forum is open to all. You do not need to be a BCC member or BitCurator user to submit a proposal and/or attend the event.

The Oregon State Archives is hosting SAA's Arrangement and Description: Fundamentals (#2633) workshop on April 16 AND 17, 2026 in Salem, Oregon. More details about the course and registration link can be found here: https://mysaa.archivists.org/nc__event?id=a0lUV0000050mPyYAI

Early registration cut-off date is 3/16/2026 11:45 PM CDT.

Please Respond by the end of February 2026 to participate: 

A student researcher at the University of Maryland is seeking practitioners and managers working in libraries, archives, or museums to participate in a research study on the processes of creating, revising, and implementing accessibility policies in their institution or department. Maisie Jones, a Ph.D. Candidate in Information at the University of Maryland College of Information is the PI of the Investigating Accessibility Policies in Archives research project. Funded by the UMD College of Information’s Frank E. Burke Graduate Research Award, this project seeks interviews from current cultural heritage managers and practitioners who have experience creating or revising internal policies, especially around accessibility, digital accessibility, or disability and accommodation.

This research is focused on learning more about what kinds of accessibility policies exist in the profession and the role those policies play in the work of libraries, archives, and museums. Practitioners who accept to participate in this project will take part in a semi-structured interview about their institution, policies, standards of practice, workflows, and the role of accessibility or digital accessibility and accommodations within their library, archive, and/or museum.

The interview will last roughly 30 minutes to an hour over the Zoom video teleconferencing platform. With consent from the interview participant, the interview audio will be captured and transcribed. There is no expectation for interview participants to be named either personally or by the name of their employer or institution. All publications or reports will default to anonymity unless a pseudonym is otherwise suggested by the participant. Participants in this research can be compensated for their time.

Please contact the project PI, Maisie Jones, at majones@umd.edu with any questions or to schedule a time for the research interview.

Maisie Jones

Doctoral Candidate in Information (ABD)            

University of Maryland College of Information

majones@umd.edu

On behalf of the Society of American Archivists Distinguished Service Award Committee, we invite you to submit nominations for the 2026 award. Please feel free to share this message with your organization and membership.

Please see the following announcement for more information.

Society of American Archivists

Distinguished Service Award

Do you know of an organization or program that has made an outstanding contribution to the archival profession? Consider nominating them for the Society of American Archivists Distinguished Service Award.

The Distinguished Service Award recognizes an archival institution, education program, nonprofit organization, or government organization that has provided outstanding service to its public and has made an exemplary contribution to the archival profession. The institution being nominated should have achieved distinction in one or more of the following ways:

• Demonstrably contributing to archival theory and the development of new archival practice;
• Serving its constituency in an outstanding fashion;
• Showing extraordinary ingenuity and resourcefulness in improving efficiency of operations or methods of work;
• Going well beyond the normal performance requirements expected of an archival agency and thus providing a model for others; and/or
• Developing over a period of years an archives program of such depth and scope as to warrant special recognition.

Eligibility:

Any archival institution, archival organization, records center, or manuscript repository, archival education program, or nonprofit or government organization providing service or support to the archival community in North America.

Nomination Requirements

In addition to a completed nomination form, each nomination must include three letters of support, of which at least two are from SAA members, each representing a different institution. Self-nominations are accepted and encouraged.

Click here to preview the nomination form and/or to start a nomination. All nominations must be submitted by February 28, 2026.