Blast from the Past: 1977

Scanning of Past Open Entry Issues and MAA Programs Continues

The 1977 Fall Meeting, like this year’s Annual Meeting, took place in Holland. Open Entry Summer 1977 front page, portion.

Open Entry has been gracing our members’ mailboxes and inboxes since 1974. Celebrating over 40 years of archival articles and updates, in the fall of 2014, MAA began scanning and posting all of Open Entry‘s issues for inclusion on the MAA website. This is a joint project of MAA and the Walter P. Reuther Library. Coordinating and publicizing the project is MAA’s Communications Team, consisting of Rebecca Bizonet, Christiane Evaskis-Garrett, and Casey Westerman.

To date, the first twelve issues of Open Entry have been made available through this project. This covers 1974-1979, Open Entry‘s first six years. In addition, three meeting programs were included within the newsletter, a sporadic occurrence. The scanned issues can be accessed from the Open Entry Past Issues page of MAA’s website, and the remaining issues will be added over the course of 2015.

A recent post looked at some of the news items from 1974 through 1976.

Here are some highlights from 1977.

Portion of page one of the 1977 Fall Meeting Program.

The Winter 1977 issue offers evidence of active committee involvement. Committees at the time included an Executive Committee, a Standards Committee, an Oral History Committee, and an Ethnic Publications Committee, which had as its charge the creation of a bibliography of all the ethnic publications in Michigan.

The Summer 1977 issue includes a report on the Spring Meeting in Kalamazoo, which garnered a headcount of 46 attendees. The meeting’s theme was on security in the archives. The keynote luncheon address was given by no less than Robert Warner, then president of the Society of American Archivists. In it, he spoke of the need for the adoption of a professional code of ethics, among other topics.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, MAA used to have two all-member meetings per year, in the fall and spring. MAA’s Fall Meeting for 1977 was held in conjunction with the Historical Society of Michigan. It was slated to take place in, coincidentally…Holland, at Hope College. (This year’s Annual Meeting is happening in Holland, too. Check out the program and register now!) Both the Winter and Summer issues publicize this past meeting, and a program is included in the Summer issue; we have also made this program separately available on our Meetings page.

Look for future articles about the scanning project’s progress, as well as highlights from pages past, here on the MAA website and in Open Entry. Meanwhile, we encourage you to delve into the issues that are currently available. What interesting facts or trends have you discovered, or rediscovered, in these documents from MAA’s past?

MAA Communications Team