Sarah M. Horowitz

Chair’s Note

It is a privilege to serve as the chair of RBMS. As we move toward a conference focused around “Momentum,” I have been thinking about the ways RBMS has changed over the fifteen years I have been a member of this community, as well as the amount of work undertaken by this all-volunteer organization. RBMS writes guidelines and best practices, provides cataloging resources, hosts webinars, and organizes a national conference each year, all of which is a truly massive amount of work. I’m lucky and grateful to step into my role as chair following behind many wonderful people who have held it in recent years, and who have inspired me in my work in RBMS and beyond.

Like much of the library and archives profession, RBMS has been in a state of transition since 2020, and we are working to make sure that our goals, events, documentation, and practices align with what our members want and need. Sometimes we have made changes to practices but not yet documented them, and sometimes we need to change our procedures so that we can make needed changes to our practices. In that vein, I want to share a bit about a number of initiatives which are currently ongoing in RBMS.

The Documentation Task Force is working to transfer old conference presentations, committee minutes, and other documents from the rbms.info website to the ALA Institutional Repository. This will allow RBMS to continue to provide access to these important documents, while making our website more flexible and easier to maintain. We will also have the benefit of long-term preservation for these materials.

RBMS will hold its second hybrid conference this June, in Costa Mesa, California. The Conference Development Committee is working to revise how we think about conference hosting, in order to allow for virtual conference proposals, ensure we ask the right questions about support for hybrid conferences, and think more expansively—geographically—about host sites since we have updated the RBMS Manual (at the winter 2024 Executive Committee meeting) to indicate that the default for RBMS business and committee meetings will now be virtual.

Work on a new Diversity Action Plan continues, growing out of the call to action by former RBMS chairs Verónica Reyes-Escudero and Petrina Jackson. The Controlled Vocabularies Editorial Group is wrapping up the work of their Prejudicial Materials Working Group and upgrading their software to allow for better and more frequent updates to the vocabularies they maintain. The Instruction and Outreach Committee is conducting a review of the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy; like all guidelines issued by ACRL, they are periodically reviewed to make sure they are up to date.

One of the roles of the Executive Committee is to answer questions about RBMS and to help members do their work. If there are questions you have, or projects you want to undertake, I encourage you to reach out to us at exec@rbms.info. I look forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming RBMS conference in Costa Mesa, the summer Executive Committee meeting, or some other event in the future.

Editor’s note: the author is Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts and Head of Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College. Horowitz is RBMS Chair for 2023–2024 and, as such, also serves as Chair of Nominating Committee for the RBMS Executive Committee 2025/2026. While the Editor requested this update, the content remains solely the author’s; no influence or suggestions were made regarding subject matter, nor was the content revised, except for punctuation.