Last week, over 130 people came together via Zoom for the annual meeting of the SAA Records Management Section.  We first had a visit from Cal Lee, editor of The American Archivist, who made a plug for submissions of records management related articles.  You can find submission guidelines here.

As the current chair of the section, I presented a brief business report of the steering committee’s activities for 2019-2020.

• We posted monthly steering committee meeting summaries to the listserv and our microsite.  (If you wish to join our listserv community, you can create an account here.)
• We revamped our microsite and added an RM toolkit with links to various best practices.
• We had 41 blog posts, including a continuation of the Resourceful Records Manager series and the introduction of two new series exploring the intersections between archives and records management work — one a series of testimonials from practitioners and the other a series of brief literature reviews exploring these intersections.
• We also posted an interview with a scholarly communications expert about the ramifications of GDPR in the U.S.
• We updated resources in our Zotero bibliography.
• We hosted three virtual coffee chats during COVID times.
• We produced calculators for the costs of storing paper and electronic records.
• We collaborated with SNAP for a Twitter chat.
• We submitted a draft proposal to the SAA Committee on Education for an RIM certificate program.

I also reported our election results, with nearly 200 section members participating:

• Krista Oldham, University Archivist at Clemson University, will be stepping into the role of Vice-Chair for the coming year, to be followed by a year as Chair, and then a year as Immediate Past Chair.
• We have a new steering committee member who will serve a 3-year term — Ryan Leimkuehler, who is University Records Manager at Kansas State University.
• We are welcoming two early career members, who will serve 1-year terms:
  • Madison Chartier is a Metadata Librarian at Oklahoma State University
  • Jes Martell is a Records Center Specialist at Pennsylvania State University

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more information here on our blog about our new committee members.

After reading an SAA Council update prepared by our liaison, we launched into our lightning round presentations centered around carrying out records management responsibilities in academic settings.

• Jessika Drmacich, Records Manager and Digital Resources Archivist at Williams College, talked about “The Records Manager in the Library.”
• Krista Oldham, University Archivist at Clemson University, spoke about “Getting a Seat at the Table.”
• Eric Stoykovich, College Archivist and and Manuscript Librarian at Trinity College, talked about “Remote Records Management.”
• Greg Wiedeman, University Archivist at the University of Albany, talked about “Why our records program is bad, and how I’m okay with that.”
• Elizabeth Carron, currently Accessioning Archivist at Boston College, reflected on selecting RM projects and partnering with GLAM institutions while she worked at the University of Michigan.
• Hillary Gatlin, Records Manager at Duke University, talked about “Developing Proactive Outreach.”

We intended to have breakout sessions that would focus on some of the issues that were raised by our query on our recent ballot, but technology interfered with that plan.  So instead, we had more generalized discussions and will plan in the coming weeks to organize times that we can have virtual meetings about those topics like developing RM programs, e-records management, and RIM education.

You can access the slide deck from this meeting here, and a recording will be made available by SAA.  And remember, if you have a topic or a work product that you’d like for us to consider adding to our developing agenda, please contact any steering committee member or send us an email at saarecordsmanagement@gmail.com.  You can also post to our discussion list through SAA Connect, and if you’d like to write a post for our blog, once again, please reach out to the steering committee.

Update: The recording of this meeting is now available at https://www.pathlms.com/saa/events/1994/event_sections/11946/video_presentations/172335.