3: PUBLIC AWARENESS AND ADVOCACY

Public Awareness and Advocacy

Other Information:

Issue Statement: Archivists face a daunting and too often unsuccessful challenge in competing for decision makers’ limited funds and support, which endangers the goals of ensuring citizens’ rights, enabling organizational accountability, and making history accessible through archival programs. Desired Outcomes: As the nation’s largest and oldest archival association, SAA should take a sustained leadership role in promoting public awareness of professional archivists and archival work. Advocacy must become one of the profession’s core concerns and SAA must develop the capabilities for conducting effective, ongoing advocacy work. We must build partnerships with other archival and related professional associations at the national, regional, and local level in order to command the greater resources that will be needed to influence public awareness effectively. When SAA and the archival profession successfully come to terms with this challenge, all of the following statements will be true: Congress funds the “Partnership for the American Historical Record” (PAHR) at a level allowing greatly increased support for state and local archives programs. This would mean a National Archives budget of $500 million, with at least $20 million allocated for PAHR. American Archives Month is a well-established program with wide participation by archival programs that attracts steadily increasing media coverage and public awareness. SAA members are able to provide a simple, accurate, and compelling description of what an archivist does and the value of archives.

Objective(s):

3.1: Archives Month

3.2: Historical Records Partnership

3.3: Job and Value Description

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