Dear TARO members,

As we move into the next phase of the TARO infrastructure update, Amanda Focke and I wanted to send out an update about our NEH planning grant and share the next steps for the TARO Steering Committee.

The final version of our NEH planning grant may be reviewed here. Our deepest thanks go out to all of you who helped make this grant happen with your participation on TARO committees this year—we accomplished a whole lot during the grant term! Amanda and I were especially pleased that we were able to include a Memorandum of Understanding with UT Libraries in the final report. A special thanks goes out to Aaron Choate from UT Libraries for writing the MOU and steering it through UT Libraries’ administration. Note that the MOU covers just the interim grant phase, it is not a final determination of TARO’s institutional home. However, this MOU does provides us with a solid home base from which to apply for implementation funds.

TARO will now head into a new phase with its the Steering Committee, which will be a smaller group over the coming months: Amanda Focke will serve as Chair, Sandra Yates will serve as Vice-Chair, Carol Mead will serve as Secretary, and Carla Alvarez, Ann Hodges, and Kelly Kerbow-Hudson will be our At-Large Reps. In addition, Aaron Choate will become much more involved with the TARO Steering Committee, acting as the UT Libraries representative on the committee. Steering Committee members will no longer chair subcommittees.

We hope that everyone who’d like to be involved the TARO implementation project will continue to do so through TARO subcommittees; we expect that subcommittee work will begin ramping up again in the New Year after the new Steering Committee has had a chance to meet.

There’s a lot to look forward to with TARO over the next year, including the continuation  and conclusion of the schema conversion project, planning for submission of the implementation grant, continued discussions regarding TARO’s institutional home, and ongoing updates to TARO spaces like the blog and wiki. In addition, Amanda and I are also happy to announce that we’ll be giving a TARO training workshop at SSA in Fayetteville in May 2017.

Best,

Amy and Amanda

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Amy Bowman, Outgoing Co-Chair, TARO Steering Committee Photographs Archivist, Briscoe Center for American History