A Brief History of the Electronic Records Section
The predecessor to the Electronic Records Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) was the Electronic
Records Roundtable (ERR), which had two trial runs as SAA sessions before becoming an official roundtable. ERR
held its first meeting at the September 1992 SAA meeting in Montreal.
In 1993, at the SAA conference New Orleans, President Edie Hedlin asked the ERR to transform itself into the
Electronic Records Section. Hedlin’s reasoning was that roundtables within the SAA are merely informal groups
that promote discussion on a specific topic. Sections, however, are more formal and also sponsor sessions on
topics of interest for the annual meetings, participate in outreach and education, and respond to proposed
rules and standards.
Given the importance of the issue of electronic records in the archival world, it was time to transform the
roundtable into a section. So Tom Ruller and Nancy McGovern met in Albany to devise the operating structure
for the group, and the roundtable held a mid-year meeting in 1994 at the National Archives and Records
Administration to make the transition.
The Electronic Records Section (ERS) held its first official meeting at SAA in 1994. For the 1995 SAA
meeting in Washington, DC, the section sponsored a series of electronic records sessions and hosted an
information open house with representatives from affiliated organizations, including the American Society
for Information Science (ASIS) and the International Association of Social Science Information Service
and Technology (IASSIST). In 1999 the ERS annual meeting hosted a talk concerning document and records
management applications. At that same SAA meeting, the ERS sponsored a discussion forum relating to
current research in electronic records management.
Over the years, the ERS has taken seriously its responsibility to foster good management of all
electronic records, especially those that are archival. To those ends, the section reviews a number
of session proposals on electronic records for the SAA annual meeting and endorses the best of those.
The section also often responds to suggested changes in laws and rules governing the management of
electronic records. In January of 2002, the section sent the National Archives and Records
Administration a detailed response to a Public Citizen Petition related to portions of 36 Code of
Federal Regulations 1234, "Electronic Records Management." In September 2002, the section responded
to the National Archives’ proposed program for redesigning records management at the federal
government level.
For more on recent ERS activities, please see the website. You can find annual reports, bylaws, recent
issues of the section newsletter and stories on hot topics at
http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/ers/index.asp. For more on who’s who in the ERS, please see the
webpage on ERS Leaders at
http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/ers/leaders.asp.
Page last updated: 13 August 2005
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