Minutes from the Annual Working Group Meeting 2012

Working Group Agenda

 Friday, August 10, 2012

 3:00-3:30 PM

Greeting/Introduction 

 Meeting Goal

 Review progress on Standards & Best Practices resource guide (http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/museum/standards.htm) that expands on the success of the Museum Archives manual and allows for expanding resource-sharing across institutions. The project provides all section members with community updated resources as well as a participation platform – especially for members who cannot always attend the conferences

Discussion

 Introduction of Current WG Participants

Rachel Chatalbash:  Content Coordinator – worked with liaisons to gather examples of best practices

Brian Wilson:  Collected archival description style guides

 Lindsey Turley:  Disaster preparedness policies and space planning documents

Susan Miller:  Collecting current records policies

Heidi Abby:  Access documentation

Review of Phase I

Phase I: Development of research and resource repository for policies, procedures, forms, and best practices, 2011–2012.

 Collaboration with Standards Portal (http://www2.archivists.org/standards)

Museum Archives Section Standards & Best Practices resource guide webpage (http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/museum/standards.htm)

 Notes:

Our section has found that people really want sample policies and are interested in seeing them, but they don’t necessarily have them.

The initial materials that are currently on the website went up about a month ago but have yet to be heavily promoted.

Collaborating with the standards portal sort of modified what we were planning to do.

Redefining Phase I

OLD Phase II: Investigation and possible inclusion of social media, news, updates, and announcements, 2012-2013.

New Proposed Phase II: Review and refine resources through a survey and continued focused collecting. Create procedures for ongoing maintenance of resources.

Notes:Now that we’ve moved to the portal, the previous Phase II is no longer appropriate.  We propose refining the resources that are already available. 

Evaluate the content we have and make sure that what we have serves as good examples of best practices. 

How does the working group feel about the revised phase two? Heidi suggests: working toward collecting social media policies.

Promotion:  do a story on the newsletter to promote the guide.  Do a story on the newsletter to promote social media from former phase II.

Is there anything that hasn’t been done?  Suggestion create templates for policies and procedures for which there are no examples.

What about resources from outside museums?  University archives?  Suggestion to post non-museum created policies if museum archivists are using them.

 We could put out a call for areas that need development first.  If nothing comes out of the museum archives community, we could post resources from alternate institutions.

 Add a section to the website to solicit submissions  -- ask the community to share an additional type of resource.

Creating policies and procedures for maintaining the site beyond the working group.  Create a steering committee that’s in charge of emailing institutions that have the resources once every six months or so to make sure the resources are up to par/ up to date.

Suggestion: once every few years, reach out to institutions again more broadly to see what else has been created.

May need to create a universal watermark and a date stamp to let people know that resources were gathered by the museum archives section as part of a best practices guide.  Date stamp won’t be creation date but rather the date the resource was gathered by the working group.

File naming convention?  We don’t need to think one.

In terms of making this useful: promotion, watermark, re-analyzing sections and the information in them, gathering more materials for the sections with gaps, creating templates for the sections that are sparse or that we can’t gather information for.

If you are interested in taking a more active role in working group activities, please contact one of the working group members.  Formal opportunities will be opening, and there’s plenty to do.

Are we considering any kind of evaluation in terms of feedback and assessment? Once everything is gathered, we might create a simple survey asking if this resource is helpful, what’s missing, if there are any resources that ought to be included.

This sort of resource might be useful for archives education as well – this could also be a resource for schools. 

Is records management a big stumbling block?  No, that’s the part we have because of grant requirements to share schedules.