2015-05-27 Meeting notes

Date

19 May 2015

Attendees

Goals

Updates from working groups (ADMS)
Housekeeping - upcoming events, speaker scheduling for summer term, meeting time
Discussion with University Records Manager, Maryrose Hightower-Coyle: Records Management for Cultural Repositories on Campus
- Q1: Can you give an overview of how records management works at UT? How does this differ from other institution types (government, private sector etc.)
- Q2: What are the challenges that you face day-to-day? What challenges do you anticipate for the future?
- Q3: Can you give an overview of the types of records you deal with? Does it vary a lot between departments?
- Q4: Do you provide specific training on born digital records? From your perspective, how do they differ from paper records?
- Q5: Do you have to deal with complex digital object or databases? How does this impact your work?
- Q6: How is training being conducted? Do you meet in person with decision-makers in each department?
- Q7: Do you follow up with departments if they don't adhere to their retention schedules?
- Q8: Who's responsibility is it to flag potentially sensitive information?
- Q9: How actively do departments participate in records retention and contact you about disposal?
- Q10: The Briscoe center, as the home of the UT archives, sometimes receives material directly from departments, not through records management, is this an issue?
- Q11: By what process do materials pass into the archives? How is this decision made? How archives and records management interact?

Discussion items

Time	Item	Who	Notes
10 min	update on archival management system proposal	Fishman, Jessi, Esther E Kirchner, Paloma Graciani Picardo	Received approval for 1 month pilot project to evaluate Archives Space Will choose a handful of representative collections Will not pay for membership for purposes of pilot Will generate documentation that other repositories will hopeful find helpful Fishman, Jessi put in paperwork for capstone students to help with project Becky Romanchuk from the Texas State Library may also be interested in evaluating Archives Space- should contact
10 min	updates on crowd-sourced description experiments at UT Libraries	Jennifer R Hecker	Completed project to explore possibility of gamified zine metadata creation by non-information professionals Will be starting a project on MetadataGames for photo-tagging and FromThePage for transcription & indexing Adam Rabinowitz from Archaeology dept. is looking to digitize a diary and have students transcribe- has received a pedagogical grant for project Future talks: Jennifer or Adam on their above projects?
5 min	Other updates	Carla Alvarez, Jennifer R Hecker, Donna J Coates	Carla was at SSA Attended a talk on A/V Benson has a conference and workshop coming up on Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Closing rare books to accommodate Workshop presenters will pick items from the collection and talk about them Jennifer attended a talk by Samantha Bruner about the LGBT+ archives at SSA made up of half community members, half archivists, serve as "archival brokers" between community and collecting institutions fund-raise and collect materials Goal is to donate collections plus money to pay for them to get processed Donna says that some SAA webinars are coming up, she will send out more information
5 min	Scheduling for future meetings	all	No one present objected to current standing time
60 min	Records management for cultural repositories	Hightower-Coyle, Maryrose	What is a record? Denise Besserat (linguist) wrote "How Writing Came About" Interpreted Sumerian tokens as accounting records How will our culture be interpreted someday? Legally, every public institution is required to have a records management program and officer Texas Library sets the standards and guidelines for Texas institutions (Texas code 441) The records management program is tied to open records law (Texas code 552) Ensures public access Some vendor systems are not set up to provide access, which causes difficulties State records consist of pretty much everything we do Records management systems An enterprise document management system will be purchased in fall System will capture, manage, generate and handle docu-sign currently decommissioning old system digital objects are in poor condition Will have a governance committee in development phase of putting system out for community use Will conduct info sessions for new system all through summer describe toolkit, come up with use-cases Preservation will be emphasized in the front-end of the process Working more closely with IT to ID upstream born-digital materials that will have historic value Hope to implement quickly after purchase President's office may be the first department for implementation Private sector vs. public No open access requirement in private sector Goals of RM: Help business do its business respond to audits, regulations and provide evidence Provide access and consider historical value (public institutions only) Some private corporations are starting to consider historical value, but obv. they are not required to do so. Records management at Universities Universities are in a gray area Some materials are consider state records, others are not Papers written by a professor are not considered state records Interest in "protecting the student experience" Communications between students and professors are protected Student names in the context of student activities are also protected Lots of donations come in which are not considered state records Universities exempted from requirements to send their historic records to the State archive Universities can send their state records to a university archive Records retention schedule must still comport with the requirements put forth by the Texas State Library Archivists have final discretion over whether materials have lasting historic value and should therefore be archived Some collections are specifically flagged as having historic value, or tending to have historic value Departments can request to dispose of records through records management, release for destruction or send to archives Record manager keeps documentation of any transfer Jessi: How does this process distinguish between state and non-state records? Maryrose: regulations only apply to state records Maryrose focuses on building relationships with departments across campus facilitates tranfers directly to archives of non-state records Knows who is in compliance and can follow-up, but don't have a lot of resources to devote to follow-up- relies on good relationships Conducts a lot of training sessions for staff of various departments Digital preservation There will likely be a gap in our institutional history- paper keeps for ages, but digital assets have already been lost Advocating for better digital preservation Records management tends to get delegated down- hard to meet with actual decision makers Need for more education/brochure for higher-ups to educate them about the importance of this work When decommissioning old system, will need to think about the old data inside Records management systems are designed to preserve data for the length of the retention schedule Archiving is not in their purview Digital teaching objects can be very complex Digital asset management systems are needed to handle them The Teaching and Learning department has taken over a lot of these objects Digital asset managers need to get together with archivists and records managers to make preservation decisions about these objects Confidentiality issues Confidential records: records which the university is not required to produce upon request records are public by law, but law includes 79 exceptions There is also a body of rulings by the state AG that set precedent for stuff to not be made available University can request a ruling from the AG if they think records should remain confidential All other records must be produced on request, but are not otherwise published If staff ID records that they think have historic value, they can contact records manager and have sent to archives records with historic value tend not to contain confidential information President's office is a tricky situation May try to close the records at least temporarily so that records manager can look them over, this may encourage compliance from department The sheer volume and diversity of records is an issue 600 record series to deal with Discrete sections of a record series may have additional retention requirements which make disposition complicated Additional notes Departments are not supposed to destroy things that aren't accounted for in their retention schedules Records managers must have a relationship with the department so that when new record types spring up, RM is made aware and can come up with retention schedules Records managers have no enforcement mechanism- again, must rely on good working relationships Internal audits sometime enforces records retention- reports directly to President's office Transitory information can be deleted as soon as it has served its purpose ex.: written notes that are then transferred to a more permanent medium Maryrose sits on a records management committee for Texas Comes up with shared retention schedules talk about institutional practices come to agreement on retention policies

Action items

Donna J Coates will send out more information about upcoming SAA webinars
Jessica Wesley Meyerson will contact Becky Romanchuk at the Texas State Library about an Archives Space evaluation
Look into possibility of future talk by Jennifer Hecker or Adam Rabinowitz on their projects?