CEPC 2013 Annual Meeting Minutes

Society of American Archivists

Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct

Minutes of Annual Meeting

13 August 2013

Prepared by Phil Eppard, Outgoing CEPC Chair

The Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct met at the New Orleans Hilton Riverside on 13 August 2013 at 1 p.m. Chair Phil Eppard and Council Representative Bill Landis were in attendance and were later joined by Marc Brodsky. Discussion was carried out via conference call with those who could not be in New Orleans. Additional participants were Nancy Freeman, Paul Lasewicz, Tiffany Schureman, and Sharon Silengo.

Most of the meeting was spent discussing the draft of the call for submissions for case studies in archival ethics. Discussion first concerned the need to provide a bit more direction to those considering submitting case studies, such as providing examples of categories drawn from the various sections of the code. It was felt that such a list would help channel thinking about the different topics for case studies.

The draft proposal assumed that completed case studies would be submitted, but after some discussion the committee decided that it would be better to have people submit proposals to prepare case studies. CEPC would then review these proposals and accept or reject them. One advantage of this approach is that the committee could thereby help avoid duplication of studies on similar themes.

Bill Landis suggested that SurveyMonkey could be used to create a simple submission form for case study proposals. He quickly created a mock submission form and emailed it to the CEPC list.

In conclusion, the committee agreed to go with SurveyMonkey and to amend the call for proposals to reflect the new submission protocol. It should be made clear in the call that proposals only, including a narrative description of no more than 150 words, will be submitted via SurveyMonkey. (All the elements of the SurveyMonkey form are represented in the draft call’s description of a cover sheet that was to accompany completed case studies.)

Discussion of a timeline included suggestions to have proposals submitted by November 1 and to have the committee begin reviewing them immediately. CEPC will first have to revise the call and create the final SurveyMonkey submission instrument. While the announcement would be described a call for a “first round”, CEPC would be open to receiving proposals after any stated deadline. The hope was that case studies could be submitted for final review and editing in spring 2014.

In other business, at the end of the meeting, Phil Eppard announced that the two program proposals endorsed by CEPC were approved: “Archival Ethics: What Would You Do? How Would You Do It?” and “Ideal and Real: Striving for Archival Perfection in an Imperfect World.”