Australian Society of Archivists Inc. University Archives Special Interest Group. Minutes of the Annual General Meeting held 18 August 2015

Transcription

1 Australian Society of Archivists Inc. University Archives Special Interest Group Minutes of the Annual General Meeting held 18 August 2015 University Club, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania Present and in attendance Anne Picot (Convenor), Kirsten Wright (Secretary), Sigrid McCausland, Antony Catrice, Sue Coppin, Libby Nichol, Kathryn Dan, Lucinda Davies, Laura Harris, Katie Bird, Ann Hardy, Gionni Di Gravio, Bruce Ibsen, Douglas Pitt, Jason Flello, Lyndal O Donnell, Tim Robinson, Deborah Naray, Maria Carvalho, Debra Paisley, Cathie Lester, Karen Anderson, Cathy Fyfe, Liz Irving, Margaret Avard, Susan Jones, Juliette Beale, Jennie Dobson. 1. Welcome and acknowledgement of country by Anne Picot. 2. Apologies received from: Kylie Percival, Chris Stueven, Katrina Dean, Adelaide Parr, Craigie Sinclair, Natasha Watt, Sarah Brown, Maggie Shapley and Julia Mant. 3. Minutes of the meeting held 30 September 2014 in Christchurch were confirmed. Moved Katie Bird seconded Maria Carvalho. Correction required in UQ update Gatton College not Gatwick College Secretary to action. 4. Matters arising from the minutes: At last year s meeting a motion was raised at the ASA AGM regarding the state of recordkeeping in universities, in particular the risk to student records, due to ongoing cuts and restructures at many universities. The motion was raised at the AGM and referred to the incoming Council. Council discussed the matter and requested the Convenor develop a statement to frame further discussions. This was not able to occur so the matter stands as it did previously. 1

2 5. Institutional updates: Cathy Fyfe University of Tasmania: 2015 was the 125 th anniversary of the University of Tasmania records management unit and special collections assisted (archival records are at the Tasmania Archives & Heritage Office). New student management system was implemented with ongoing work required. Issue of how to deal with legacy systems. RM unit has done a lot of sentencing and disposal work. There have been restructures and staff leaving loss of corporate memory. TAHO commenced an audit of recordkeeping. Gonni Di Gravio University of Newcastle: Celebrating their 50 th anniversary. Lots of digitisation projects including 2 major oral history collections. Flickr site is going well and hits have increased dramatically over the last few years (40,000 images online). Issue of senior management staff who are not aware of their responsibilities in the RM and archives space discussion of best way to provide this information to senior management. Bruce Ibsen University of Queensland: Records & Archives Unit broken up at the end of 2014 Archives re-aligned with the Fryer Library again. TRIM is being upgraded but both records and archives areas underresourced. Will be digitising stuff in the near future which may increase publicity. Douglas Pitt University of South Australia: Celebrating 25 th anniversary of Uni SA and the RM unit has assisted with finding material for the 25 th. Has also provided the opportunity to push for a University Archivist as this position does not currently exist. Libby Nichol University of Auckland: VC s Office relocated from the office they had held for the last 30 years so the archives inherited many boxes which need to be assessed. Currently using Archivist Toolkit to manage their archives and special collections but looking to upgrade to Archives Space. Cathie Lester University of Western Sydney: The RM & Archives unit has been in a state of flux for the last 12 months and a new manager was very recently appointed. An online exhibition space has been developed and they are looking to upgrade to RM 8. Kathryn Dan University of Melbourne: Archives (on behalf of Katrina Dean): Significant transfers have included the Germaine Greer Archive, Australian Red Cross Archive, last transfer of Fraser papers, and several transfers of university records. 2 research fellowships supported by the Hugh Williamson Foundation are available for to enable research in the archives. Lots of digitisation has occurred in particular the Trades Hall Council minutes and WWI diaries. Records management unit: Large restructure across university in including lots of relocations. Lots of appraisal and transfer work because of this. Records unit is trying to educate and intervene before staff leave or move and more work will occur in this area. Deborah Naray University of Technology Sydney: A campus master plan has been developed which means new buildings but also lots of relocations. Records Unit relocated last year as part of this process. Parts of the campus will be shut down so 2

3 RMU also working through these processes. Focus for the rest of 2015 is on an electronic document & digital recordkeeping strategy. Jason Flello University of the South Pacific: USP will be 50 in 2018 an archive is currently being created. USP has no legislative requirement to have an archive so working through issues on what to keep in the archive without legislative mandate. The tropical environment is an issue and current storage conditions are not ideal. The USP is located across islands but also across countries which can be challenging need to be aware of jurisdictional requirements for the different countries as well as university requirements. Sigrid McCausland Charles Sturt University: A significant restructure program has been announced. Sigrid teaches in the School of Information Studies and Wayne Doubleday is the University Archivist. The archives are located in Wagga Wagga and Wayne has done a lot to publicise the archives (eg, weekly column in local paper). Information Studies students are all taught via distance ed but come to Wagga at the start of their degree and visit the archives. 2 summer scholarships are available for students to do research in the university archives one for history students, one for archive students. Currently looking for a new management system for the archives. Lyndal O Donnell University of the Sunshine Coast. No university archives combined information services team. About to start a pilot for a new EDRMS which will involve shutting down shared drives. 20 th anniversary to be celebrated. Starting to lose corporate memory as staff who were there 20 years ago are starting to retire. Sue Coppin University of Adelaide: Received second inscription onto the Australian Memory of the World Register in collaboration with the SA Museum, for the records of the Board for Anthropological Research. Discovered that Dental School still held a lot of materials relating to expeditions into central Australia. Volunteers working to digitise the collection gets a lot of use by indigenous people and communities. RMU: employed a records manager again and hired new TRIM Administrator. Upgrade to RM 8 soon. Consolidated lots of records stored offsite into a central repository. Continuing cuts to funding across university including sales of campuses, relocations etc. Katie Bird University of New South Wales: Converting Tabularium records into record types in TRIM. Working very well on the whole improved searching and better integration with digital material. Katie was appointed as University Archivist and the Assistant Archivist position is filled now too. New VC earlier in the year meant reviews and restructuring. The library has been digitising material from the archives including university handbooks, calendars, university and student magazines. Maria Carvalho and Debra Paisley University of Western Australia: Undergone a functional review, and now changes are being implemented. The Director has been seconded to transformation projects. Archives volunteer program on hold until 2017, as current resourcing means it cannot be managed. Lots of relocations and disposal and sentencing work. Issues still with storage space. The transformation is IT platform focussed and the involvement of the Director means the IM strategy can be central to the whole process. But means it is challenging to undertake business as usual work in the meantime. 3

4 Tim Robinson and Anne Picot University of Sydney: Change in staffing as Anne will be retiring website developed joint project between university archives and university historian to tell stories from WWI. A physical exhibition has been developed as well as online space. Further identification of images from indigenous communities has occurred archives liaising with communities and repatriating images in the form the communities want. Seeking further funding to continue this work. A major upgrade / rewrite of the archives control system is underway. RMU: Upgrading to RM 8 which has been challenging as it is integrated with a lot of business systems. Rolling out TRIM workflow to manage academic misconduct and plagiarism processes. The workload for FOI/privacy requests has been increasing. Some applications starting to test the boundaries between what are and are not university records. Margaret Avard ANU reporting on behalf of Maggie Shapley: Major change has been the introduction of an electronic records management system as of June no one is meant to create paper files. Digitisation getting approval to destroy records after digitising from NAA. The Archives database (AtoM) is online and has had a large impact on people viewing collection items online. About 50% of item lists are currently available and data entry is occurring on the rest. All ANU annual reports from 1956, all ANU calendars and Canberra college ( ) calendars have been digitised. Currently part of ANU open access repository but hoping to develop own repository to accommodate and film and sound collections too. Susan Jones University of Wollongong: Digitisation and exhibitions have been the focus for the last couple of years. Work closely with the library for digitisation and also exhibitions team. Digital material is posted on 3 different platforms: institutional repository, online archives site and Flickr. Flickr is used for old photos and gets a lot of traffic. They have had good feedback from past students and staff. 3 major exhibitions in the last 18 months: WWI, Exploration, and 40 th anniversary of separation from UNSW. Physical and online exhibitions plus weekly talks. Completed a collaborative history project with Wollongong City Library and Illawarra Historical Society digitised historical society s newspapers and made available. Karen Anderson and Kirsten Wright Victoria University: Archives: VU is celebrating its centenary in 2016 and there has been extensive work in the archives already for this. A historian was engaged to develop text for an exhibition and visited the archives several times and the archives also provided artefacts for the exhibition. List of important events and timeline developed for use in centenary work. Karen is also working on a project to list, describe and digitise the papers of indigenous activist Gary Foley. Initial grant money received from ANDS. RMU: Organisational changes and restructuring have meant ongoing appraisal and disposal work. Student records is currently located on a campus which will be rented out next year relocation of all student files imminent. FOI requests have increased in number and also in complexity. Liz Irving La Trobe University: La Trobe will be 50 in Liz is the University Archivist after several years of no one in that position. Also went through uni-wide restructure but Records & Archives team did not lose staff or budget. Significant disaster 4

5 in archives repository meant a new repository was required. New area includes a secondary space for processing and sentencing of temporary records too. Considering digitisation but main focus has been on the disaster and saving the collection. Antony Catrice Deakin University: 40 th anniversary celebrations physical and online exhibition for this which was well received. Donations of material have increased out of the 40 th anniversary celebrations. Ongoing digitisation of photos, videos too, including setup where videos of different formats can be digitised. Risk assessment & assessment for compliance with storage standard which highlighted many problems. Submission developed and funding to either build new space or refurbish existing archives space received. Records Manager is retiring and will be replaced by a new position around Information Management. Break for morning tea thankyou to the University of Tasmania for providing. 6. Cathy Fyfe and Juliette Beale presented on the 125 th Anniversary of the University of Tasmania. University of Tasmania archival records were transferred to the Tasmania Archives & Heritage Office (TAHO) in 2000 and have not had an archivist since then. Requests came into the Special Collections branch of the library and to the Records Management Unit. A website was developed ( telling 125 stories for 125 years. Contributions from current & former staff and students. RMU assisted with searching TAHO material and also to provide information to researchers about where they could find the different types of resources they needed. Also a good opportunity to promote good records management the records the university creates today will be used in 100 years time. Opportunity for RMU to learn more about the history and heritage side of records management but also challenging as there were frequently urgent requests which were time consuming to respond to. 7. Kirsten Wright presented on the results of the AURA/ASA University benchmarking survey presentation to be sent out to members with minutes. 8. Discussions occurred about potential matters to be brought to the attention of the ASA AGM. Topics included the ongoing risk to student records and broader issues within university sector with so many restructures and redundancies. Research data was also highlighted as an area of great complexity and concern. It was also highlighted that there was no simple way for a SIG to report back to the ASA Council or at the AGM. It was therefore determined that this issue would be raised at the AGM, so the Council could consider how SIGs may better report issues to Council and broader ASA membership. 9. Katie Bird was elected as Convenor and Kirsten Wright as Secretary. The SIG thanked Anne Picot for her work as Convenor and wished her well on her retirement. The SIG confirmed that everyone present approved the minutes of the meeting be available on the Uni Archives SIG webpage, rather than behind a members-only signon. 10. Next meeting to be held in Sydney/Parramatta, to coincide with the 2016 ASA Conference in Parramatta. 5