The Architectural Records Roundtable
of the Society of American Archivists
Architectural Records Roundtable 2004 Annual Report
Date December 14, 2004
Name of Section/Roundtable Architectural Records Roundtable
Officers
Beth Dodd, co-chair
Ardys Kozbial, co-chair
(The annual report was written by Ardys Kozbial.)
Report from annual meeting
Number of attendees : 38
Election results : Members requested that Ardys and Beth continue to co-chair the roundtable for another year.
Summary of meeting activities : See below for meeting minutes.
Completed projects/activities
·Established an e-mail distribution list for the roundtable which now has approximately 100 members.
·Members of the roundtable had been asking for a session on managing architectural records in electronic formats. That session happened, very successfully with 50 attendees, at the 2004 conference.
Ongoing projects/activities
·The roundtable would like to put up a very simple web site comprised of architectural records resources and is still in search of a web master.
·Ideally, the roundtable submits a minimum of 2 session proposals for each annual meeting. One proposal focuses on giving conference attendees a view of the city in which the conference is held through the lens of its architecture and architectural records collections. (This was done very successfully in Los Angeles and a great set of speakers is slated for New Orleans.). The other proposal focuses on an issue dealing with managing architectural drawings collections, such as the electronic records session.
New projects/activities
·Working with the Library of Congress, the roundtable is figuring out ways to assist in getting the National COPAR (Cooperative Preservation of Architectural Records) effort rejuvenated.
Diversity initiatives
Questions/concerns for Council attention
The following items are comments for the Council, not action items.
Program Committee. Our first experience with the program committee was for the 2002 annual conference (Birmingham) and communication was difficult that year. We have had some dealing with each program committee since then and communication is much improved.
Description of the roundtable . From the activities listed in this report, this roundtable seems to be inactive in its own projects and we, the co-chairs, wanted to take this opportunity describe the nature of this group for Council. In co-chairing the roundtable for the past two years, we have discovered that our members want the roundtable to be a resource place, and not a place that will assign more tasks to them. You can see from the meeting minutes that our members are active in the profession through their collections and in other parts of SAA. Two of our members are in the process of writing a new manual for managing architectural records.
Members are content with this roundtable acting as a resource for them. ARR members come with a wide range of experience and collections. They range from archivists with many years of experience with architectural records managing large collections to those who manage a few architectural records as part of much larger collection. We maintain a membership directory which is distributed via the e-mail distribution list and members network using that, as well as the e-mail list.
We have heard via e-mail to each of us and in conversations with individual members at annual conferences that they are happily not inundated with mail from the distribution list, but that each message is useful. The most common two themes that run through the messages are 1) where can I find the records of the Jane Doe firm? and 2) how would you manage X problem with the architectural records. After that, messages vary in topic from exhibitions (announcements and comments) to new buildings to restorations of old buildings to grants (writing, managing, new funding) to workshop announcements. It is a small and tightly knit group of people that appreciates a central place to have contact with each other.