Welcome!

Welcome to the 2017 RBMS Conference blog! Over the next few months we’ll be sharing details from our exciting conference program and more about the sights, sounds, and tastes of Iowa City. The conference theme this year is “The Stories We Tell.” What better place than Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature, to discuss and delight in storytelling? We are excited to announce that each of our three plenaries will explore a different aspect of storytelling: narrative, representation, and memory.

In the opening plenary we will examine how narrative constructs our perspective of the past, our relationships, and our identity. Speakers Valerie Hotchkiss, University Librarian at Vanderbilt University, and Micaela Blei, storyteller, PhD candidate and educator, will both share how storytelling enables us to make connections, disseminate information, and reveal hidden narratives. This plenary will prepare us for the continued discussions on how we shape and share the narratives of our collections. The panel will be moderated by Petrina Jackson, Head of Special Collections and University Archives, Iowa State University.

Our second plenary challenges us to think beyond the narrative structure and consider cultural representation within our collections—whose stories are we preserving and telling? Janet Weaver, Assistant Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives, and Angela J. Aguayo, Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Culture at Southern Illinois University, have dedicated themselves to sharing the stories of marginalized voices. Community engagement is essential to both their projects and their talks will demonstrate how to involve communities in preserving their cultural heritage and expressing their stories. This plenary will demonstrate how to successfully represent overlooked narratives in our collections. The session will be moderated by Agnieszka Czeblakow, PhD, Rare Books Librarian, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries.

Stories are most impactful when they are remembered. Our final plenary looks at how we choose to remember and interpret past narratives. Our final speakers Frank Salomon, John V. Murra Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa, and Safiya Umoja Noble, assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies , will challenge us to think about how we record information and remind us that how we choose to interpret our collections shapes how we remember our collective past. This final plenary will be moderated by Daniel J. Slive, Head of Special Collections, Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology.

As librarians and archivists, we are simultaneously listeners and storytellers. All three plenaries remind us of this dual responsibility to preserve and share our cultural heritage. We look forward to the many conversations on storytelling to come!

-Jillian Sparks
Special Collections Librarian
W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario