Welcome!
The Program and Local Arrangements Committees invite you to experience Old Bits, New Bytes:
Archival Collections—Past, Present, and Future at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference meeting
in Richmond, Virginia, October 25–27, 2001. We especially welcome members of the Society of North
Carolina Archivists (SNCA) who will be joining us for this meeting. Please take advantage of this opportunity
to meet our colleagues from south of the MARAC border.
In keeping with the conference theme, the program will focus on archival issues relating to traditional collections,
as well as the challenges created by electronic records. Numerous sessions will focus on documenting
communities and events (including ethnic groups, churches, and anniversaries) on the local level
and in a larger context. Other sessions will address relations with archival constituencies—such as donors,
volunteers, and students—as well as relations between archivists and archival repositories.
The plenary speaker will be Dr. Charles F. Bryan, Jr., director of the Virginia Historical Society and co-editor
of Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey Written by Private Robert Knox Sneden (Free Press, 2000). Bryan will
share the intriguing story of how the Society obtained four scrapbooks of Civil War watercolors and how
these drawings became a generator of revenue for the repository.
The luncheon program will feature "BluesWomen: A Performance in Story, Image, and Song," by Leni
Ashmore Sorenson, and Sheryl Warner and the Southside Homewreckers. "BluesWomen" tells the story of
early African-American blues singers, evoking the music and times of the pre-World War II era through spoken
narrative, period images, recorded songs, and live musical performance.
Conference participants will have an opportunity to visit the Library of Virginia, the Commonwealth's stateof-
the-art research facility that opened in 1997, as well as the newly constructed state records center, which
is one of the nation's largest public records storage facilities. In addition, the Local Arrangements
Committee has organized a number of tours of historic sites and archival repositories.
Richmond offers both old and new things to see and do. Come visit some of the historic attractions, enjoy
the city's fall splendor, and see the Commonwealth's twenty-first century archival repositories. We look forward
to seeing y'all in the Old Dominion in October.
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Tom Crew, Library of Virginia