So, the LGBTQ Archives Survey has been going pretty great. We’ve gotten a pretty good response rate, with responses ranging throughout the entire lower US, and even Alaska, from institutions large and small, LGBTQ specific and broader institutions. I am really incredibly grateful for the over 100 people who have taken the time to fill out the survey and share their insights into what their institutions are doing with their LGBTQ materials. 95% of the respondents have LGBTQ materials in their institution, which is slightly concerning considering queer folks are present throughout the US and it would be reasonable to assume 100% of archives, excluding extremely specific archives of a single non-queer person, should have some materials that relate to LGBTQ people. But still, 95% is pretty high, and gives us a good number of institutions with these materials. We are still collecting responses for at least another month, so if you or someone you know works for an institution and would like the survey link, email me and I’ll send it to you!
But even as we’re still collecting responses, we’re not letting the grass grow under us. We’re keeping the conversation going as much as we can. Evie and I will be presenting next month at the Society of Florida Archivists Annual Meeting in Tallahassee Florida. Our panel is called “Discussion of Access and Usage of LGBTQ Archival Material” and is really going to be more of an open discussion with the attendees about trends they are seeing in Florida right now around queer archival materials and self-censorship in the wake of so much state censorship. We’re looking forward to a great discussion with our Florida peers on the subject. If you’re going to be in Tallahassee on May 11th, please come to the conference and sit and talk with us!
SFA isn’t the only conference we’re going to this summer though. In June I will be attending the American Library Association Annual conference in Chicago and presenting a poster on our preliminary findings during the Diversity Fair Poster Session on Sunday morning. This will be our first presentation of initial findings after we close the survey, and I’m very excited that I get to do it at such a large venue as ALA Annual. Of course, I still have to make the actual poster (lolsob) so all I have is a title so far, which is just the title of the survey itself. But if you’ll be at ALA please stop in and talk to me about our results! I am so excited to share this survey with the profession as a whole!
We also are going to be writing a chapter in a book, but the book doesn’t have a publication date yet and we haven’t written the chapter yet, so I’ll post more on that when it gets closer to actually happening. Our next step is going to be coding and analyzing the long answer responses to get greater insights into the state of LGBTQ archiving, after which we will find an industry publication to publish our final results in. So stay tuned for that!