MINUTES OF 2003 ANNUAL Meeting

SAA Records Management Round Table

Session Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, August 23, 2003 8am-9:30am

Well, the annual meeting in Los Angeles is officially over, and hopefully all of you that attended have had a chance to catch up with your work. I think it is fair to say that with few exceptions, a rewarding time was had by all. For those of you not able to attend, the reception at the Getty Center was incredible--there was an opportunity to view the research library and conservation lab, as well as an exhibit of illuminated manuscripts covering roughly 750 AD to 1600. Do visit when you are in LA next time!

The Records Management Roundtable met from 8-9:30 AM on Saturday the 23rd of August.

Sarah Polirer, our liaison to the SAA/ARMA joint committee reported that the committee was interested in having greater participation from the membership and reviewed the reason for its existence. A proposal made by the committee was to have roundtable and section chairs act as the liaison to the joint committee in future. For more information, or to comment, please contact ARMA's Director of Professional Resources, Diane K. Carlisle: dcarlisl@arma.org

Our first presenter, Helen Streck, did a wonderful job of walking us through ways of addressing both paper and electronic records management in a large scale operation, which sparked some interesting discussion. I am sending along an attachment of the outline from her presentation, courtesy of Helen. Please be aware of her copyright in this original work.

Our second presenter, Steve Gilheany, shared some provocative information concerning the permanent preservation of digitized records. Factors affecting the longevity of the records are light, temperature, humidity, etc--all the same things that affect paper records. What is especially interesting though are the studies and tests done by NIST which indicate the great variance among brands of recording media for digitized records, and of course, the lack of standardization. The tests show that viability of the media is short term unless the most pristine storage conditions are observed, and this is outside the issue of its overall integrity at the time of purchase. The range of performance among the various brands should be of great interest and concern.

Steve acquainted us with the "costs" of preferring cheaper media in terms of performance, acceptable error rates within the media rather than dollars. Some of the best performing brands have already been pulled because the purchase price gave them too small a market share. People may be making these decisions to go with more affordable media without fully understanding what the variables are. Steve shared a good deal of data specific to the understanding of the media and its use for permanent records. This information is available for you at :

http://www.DVDdemystified.com/dvdfaq.html

and at Steve's http://www.archivebuilders.com with which you may already be familiar.

Your Steering Committee this year consists of :

Elizabeth Fairfax, Chair
Margaret Merrick, Vice Chair and Chair-elect
Ed Galvin, Webmaster and List administrator
Sharon Alexander-Gooding, veteran member
Sonya Black, veteran member
Russell F. Loiselle, our newest member (welcome!)
and
Sarah Polirer, Past Chair, invaluable resource ;-), and until further notice, SAA/ARMA Joint Committee liaison.

Thomas Heard has been our Newsletter editor for the past several years, but we have not been able to communicate with him over the last 12 months, and so, we are looking for a Roundtable member to fill his shoes. If you are interested in coordinating the news of the Roundtable as submitted to you, and either creating a newsletter for us, or passing it along to GRIST with any corrections or revisions for publication, please let me know per my e-mail, and many thanks in advance: asefairfax@co.island.wa.us

With the passing of the 2003 Annual meeting, we begin a new cycle by getting ready for 2004, in Boston.

Our first task is to either submit proposals for SAA sessions in Boston, or endorse those that are submitted to us for review. The deadline for submitting our endorsements or proposals is October 7, and we must provide a ranked list to SAA by November 7.

So, if you have ideas for sessions ( or for roundtable programs--which have a later deadline) please get them to me as soon as possible. Forms are available online at: http://www.archivists.org

Also, please encourage colleagues whose ideas you respect to submit their ideas to us.
There is no one theme governing the presentations or sessions in Boston next year, so anything (within reason) goes! Think about questions you'd really like answers to, issues you feel have been under-explored!

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions, and be aware that the discussion list is open for discussion and not just dissemination of information from the Steering Committee and SAA.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth
Chair, SAA Records Management Roundtable

Director, Island County Records and Information Services
phone: 360-240-5569
fax: 360-240-5553