Council of State Historical Records Coordinators, minutes, January 2001

COUNCIL OF STATE HISTORICAL RECORDS COORDINATORS
MINUTES
Arlington, VA
Saturday, January 26, 2001

1. Roll Call of the States

[Gottlieb had requested the roll call of the states at the opening session of the meeting.] In response to the roll call of the states and territories, the following answered:

Alabama (Ed Bridges)
Alaska (John Stewart)
American Samoa (James B. Himphill)
Arizona (David H. Hoober)
California (Walter P. Gray; Laren Metzer)
Connecticut (Mark H. Jones)
Delaware (Timothy Slavin)
Florida (Jim Berberich)
Georgia (David Carmicheal)
Idaho (Steve Walker)
Illinois (John Daly)
Indiana (F. Gerald Handfield, Jr.)
Iowa (Gordon Hendrickson)
Kansas (David Haury)
Kentucky (Richard Belding)
Louisiana (Florent Hardy, Jr.)
Maine (James S. Henderson)
Massachusetts (William Milhomme)
Michigan (Sandra Clark)
Minnesota (Michael Fox, Robert Horton)
Mississippi (H.T. Holmes)
Missouri (Ken Winn)
Montana (Kathryn Otto)
Nebraska (Andrea I. Faling)
Nevada (Guy Louis Rocha)
New Hampshire (Frank C. Mevers; Brian Burford)
New Jersey (Karl J. Niederer)
New Mexico (L. Elaine Olah)
New York (V. Chapman Smith; Kathleen Roe)
North Carolina (Cathy J. Morris)
North Dakota (Gerald G. Newborg)
Ohio (George Parkinson; Charlie Arp)
Oklahoma (Thomas W. Kremm)
Oregon (Roy C. Turnbaugh)
Pennsylvania (Frank M. Suran)
Rhode Island (R. Gwenn Stearn)
South Carolina (Roy H. Tryon)
South Dakota (Marvene Riis)
Tennessee (Wayne Moore)
Texas (Chris LaPlante)
Utah (Jeffery Johnson)
Vermont (Chris Burns)
Virginia (Jennifer Davis McDaid)
Washington (David Hastings)
Wisconsin (Peter Gottlieb)
Wyoming (Wendy E. Bredehoft)

2. NHPRC

Anne Newhall, NHPRC executive director, presented an update on NHPRC matters.

Richard Cameron (NHPRC) stated that grant application recommendations by state historical records advisory boards should only by for fundable possibilities. He also reported on housekeeping changes regarding grant applications. Mark Conrad (NHPRC) reported on the electronic records grants program of NHPRC.

3. NFACE Follow-up meeting of representatives from SAA, AASLH, NAGARA, COSHRC

At the National Forum on Archival Continuing Education (April 2000), the four major associations serving archivist and historical records keepers agreed to met to discuss common concerns and possible collaborative efforts. The focus of the discussion was continuing education (CE) for archivists and others who care for historical records.

Peter Gottlieb represented COSHRC at a meeting of the executive directors and other representatives from the Society of American Archivists, the American Association for State and Local History, the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, and COSHRC, held Saturday, December 9, 2000, at the Society of American Archivists’ Headquarters in Chicago IL. Those in attendance were:

Susan Fox, Executive Director, Society of American Archivists (SAA)
Terry Davis, Executive Director, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)
Sandra Clark, Director, Michigan History Center and Past President, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)
Bruce Dearstyne, University of Maryland, and Executive Director, National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA)
Peter Gottlieb, State Archivist, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and Steering Committee chair, Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (COSHRC)

Vicki Walch, NFACE Project Coordinator, attended to provide staff support, take notes on the discussion, and prepare this follow-up report. Also attending as observers were Patti O’Hara and Solveig DeSutter, SAA’s new co-directors of education.

Agenda. The participants agreed to focus their discussion in the following areas:

1. Summarizing each organization’s characteristics and principal concerns
2. Discussing what the participants most wanted to accomplish together
3. Identifying the top priorities for inter-organization actions and activities
4. Developing a plan for moving ahead

The discussion began with each representative summarizing his or her own organization’s current structure, membership, audience for continuing education, ongoing and planned CE programs,. and other factors affecting its mission and priorities. The discussion continued with all participants identifying each organization’s strengths, clarifying its relationship to the other organizations, and defining areas of common concern. A summary of this discussion is available separately.

Several agreements emerged quickly, such as the need for the executive directors of the four organizations to meet again on a regular basis. The participants then worked their way through the NFACE action agenda and identified specific activities that each organization would pursue, either on their own or in cooperation with the others.

Agreements developed by representatives from SAA, AASLH, NAGARA, COSHRC at their meeting December 9, 2000, in Chicago, Illinois.

1. The Executive Directors of SAA, AASLH, NAGARA, and COSHRC will meet again in December 2001. All agreed that it was important to continue the conversations that had begun in this meeting and expressed a desire to meet at least once a year. Those present were reluctant, however, to burden the group with the technicalities of creating a formal organization and chose for now to proceed informally. They observed that there is more friendliness and consensus among the four groups than has ever existed before and welcomed the clear intention to look on each other as allies. Bruce Dearstyne offered to host the next meeting at the University of Maryland in College Park in December 2001.

2. SAA, AASLH, NAGARA, and COSHRC want and will support a web site focusing on continuing education and will work to develop means to make it self-sustaining. The four organizations will work together to administer and maintain the existing NFACE Web site and, with the approval of their boards, all four names will be cited as sponsors on the site’s home page as soon as possible.

The NHPRC grant recently awarded to COSHRC/AASLH includes funds to study the options for continuing and enhancing the current NFACE Web site for the next year. Vicki Walch, the NFACE project coordinator, is currently maintaining the site. She will work with an Advisory Group, which will include representatives from each of the four organizations, to prepare an analysis of what is already available on the Internet and what gaps exist, clarify the roles of each organization in the Web site’s future, and define the scope and content of the site so it enhances the ongoing efforts of archival organizations but does not unnecessarily duplicate services already available. Based on this study, the group will develop a prospectus that can be used to seek outside sponsors and/or advertisers to sustain the site over the long term.

3. SAA will organize a convocation of education liaisons and education officers at its next annual meeting. Invitations will go out to allied professional associations like ARMA, SLA, and ALA as well as the regional archival associations and the archival institutes. AASLH, NAGARA, and COSHRC endorse the convocation concept and will promote it among their constituencies.

4. AASLH and COSHRC will take the lead on developing Web-based training for the grass roots. Kathleen Roe (New York), Charlie Arp (Ohio), and Sandra Clark (Michigan) have already begun outlining the curriculum that this training module should include. Additional discussions will probably occur at the COSHRC meeting in January 2001.

5. COSHRC will convene representatives from those states that have developed programs for grass roots delivery to identify successful strategies and assess potential obstacles. This meeting may occur at the NAGARA annual meeting to be held in July 2001 in Portland OR. It could include those states that have developed mentoring programs and have operated regrant programs with processing and/or training components. The group will prepare a report on their discussions and recommendations to be disseminated broadly and shared with the association Executive Directors at their meeting in December 2001. There probably is enough money left in the NFACE grant to provide limited staff support for organizing this meeting and preparing a report.

6. NAGARA will take the lead on developing a leadership/management institute with SAA, AASLH, and COSHRC operating as willing partners. AASLH offered to pilot a leadership institute in cooperation with NAGARA.

7. SAA, AASLH, NAGARA, and COSHRC all agree on the need for additional case studies in electronic records issues. There was consensus that case studies offer an excellent educational tool for electronic records topics. While SAA has an excellent body of case studies already available, archivists need additional cases on a wider variety of topics and with more up-to-date information.

8. COSHRC will ask NHPRC to make products of its grant projects more readily available, ideally via the Web. The participants pointed to the Minnesota Electronic Records Project as one specific recent project with broad applicability. Many NHPRC projects were designed to provide “models” for other institutions to follow, but when projects conclude there is no ready way to keep the resulting materials available or to publicize the results on an ongoing basis. Even if the grantees disseminate information at the close of their projects, it may be several years before a particular institution decides to try a similar effort. Staff may be unaware that useful materials were developed for comparable projects just a few years earlier.

9. The four associations will ask NHPRC to provide a research fellowship, through its existing fellowship program, once every five years to analyze information collected through all of the existing data collection efforts and report on the status of archival records programs in the United States. This fellowship could be used to support a graduate student in a university archives program or some other suitable institution. This fellowship would not involve collecting additional data, but instead would focus on correlating and analyzing all of the data already being gathered by national, regional, and state-level organizations. It would also assess trends over time by comparing recent data with those collected during earlier surveys.

Each participant agreed to take the following agreements back to their respective organization for review and endorsement.

A discussion of the proposed endorsement of the agreements was held. On motion of Michigan (Sandra Clark), with a second by New York (V. Chapman Smith), the motion passed without objection.

4. Steering Council Elections

Rocha (Nevada) presented the report on elections. He announced that the terms of Jeff Johnson (Utah), Region II representative, and Richard Belding (Kentucky), Region V representative, expire in July 2001. He reported that the Committee recommended Bredehoft (Wyoming) for Region II and Slavin (Delaware) for Region V. Elections will be held prior to the July 2001 meeting in Portland, Oregon. Gottlieb announced that Walter Gray (California) had agreed to be Steering Committee vice-chair and would assume the chairmanship in July 2001.

5. Financial Report

Vicki Walch, NFACE Project Coordinator, presented the following COSHRC/NFACE financial report.

EXPENDITURES THROUGH 12/31/00 (3 NHPRC GRANTS
COSHRC Meetings January 1999 (Arlington) (travel, subsistence) July 2000 at NAGARA January 2001 (Arlington) (incomplete)	$26,255 $2,736 $150
NFACE Expenses Staffing (Walch, Burlis-Freilich, 3 clerical support) Program Committee (2 meetings) Conference expenses Travel, hotel charges Speakers A/V and technical equipment Supplies Printing Long distance/fax Postage Association Working Group Meeting (Dec 2000 in Chicago)	$62,729 $15,004 $73,237 $24,050 $7,836 $2,798 $3,982 $490 $1,348 $2,290
Services Accounting management (AASLH) Web programming/hosting fee	$7,522 $5,425
TOTAL SPENT THROUGH 12/31/00	$235,852
TOTAL RECEIVED 1st grant 2nd grant 3rd grant (not including Native American Archives project)	$190,800 $183,072 $56,123
REMAINING FUNDS	$194,143

By-Law Amendments

Bridges (Alabama) proposed an amendment to the by-laws:

Be it resolved at the January 27, 2001, meeting of the Council of State Historical Records coordinators that the bylaws of the Council be amended at its July 2001 meeting in Portland, Oregon, to change Article X. If approved, the current Article X shall be repealed and replaced by a new Article X as state below:

The bylaws may be amended by two-thirds of the members attending any regular announced meeting of the Council, provided that 30 days notice of the intent to amend and a copy of the proposed amendment(s) shall have been sent to the State Coordinators. The specific wording of a proposed amendment may itself be amended by majority vote at the meeting at which the amendment is considered, providing that the subject of the amendment be related to the issued covered in the advance notice.

Slavin moved adoption of the amendment for voting at the July 2001 meeting. Walker (Idaho) seconded the motion. Without objection, the amendment passed. Gottlieb requested the Steering Committee secretary to post the proposed amendment on the COSHRC list-serve and stated that such posting would served as notice of intent.

Chair of the Steering Committee Gottlieb (Wisconsin) called the meeting to order at 3:00 p.m.