For those who couldn’t attend the Records Management Roundtable meeting at SAA 2015, I wanted to provide a summary. We had about 60 people turn out for the meeting on August 21, 2015. I started the meeting by describing some of our activities from the past year, such as our revised bylaws, the contributions of the steering committee to The Schedule blog, and changes to the newsletter. We only had one Google Hangout over the last year and we would like to hold more. This is a good opportunity for members to choose a topic and have a discussion.
For the rest of the meeting we had eight presenters give lightning talks. Each presenter had about five minutes and then we had a few minutes for questions. This was the first time I had organized an event like this and it was a good experience to find people in a variety of positions, including faculty, university archivists, corporate archivists, consultants, and records managers. While the talks were brief, the presenters did a great job of summarizing their topics, sharing best practices, and asking critical questions. Thank you to all of the presenters for their contributions!
You can see the Twitter discussion here with just #rmrt and #rmrt #rmrt and #saa15.
Here were the list of presenters:
- Anthony Cocciolo, Ed.D., Associate Professor, Pratt Institute, School of Information and Library Science, presented on his study that explores options for expediting the appraisal of email records for permanent retention, using a New York art museum as a case.
- Sarah R. Demb, Senior Records Manager/Archivist, Harvard University Archives, discussed records management as a tool for risk mitigation that can be embedded into university governance structures.
- Lori Ashley, Principal Consultant, Tournesol Consulting, asked how to better leverage the appraisal and records scheduling process to advance active preservation while records remain in the custody/control of the records producers.
- Sarah Wagner, Amway, shared Amway’s process of ‘purging’ to the Archives for how they assign historical designation to the Corporate Records Retention Schedule.
- Janice Schulz, Records Manager, Omya Inc., shared on the records manager's role in legal discovery, and how to leverage your knowledge to increase your visibility and value.
- Josh Schneider, Assistant University Archivist, Stanford University, demonstrated ePADD as a tool to appraise, process, and provide rich access to email archives.
- Jessica Williams, Utilities Records & Info Management Coordinator, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, shared her experiences with hiring students, including job descriptions for graduate assistants, undergrad/graduate hourlies and expectations for those roles.
- Arian Ravanbakhsh, Office of the Chief Records Officer, National Archives and Records Administration, described recent NARA efforts in federal records management, including initiatives to help federal agencies meet the goal of managing their email records in electronic form by 2016.
Thank you again to all the presenters and to all those who attended and participated in lively discussions!
