After several years when the Section University and Research Institution Archives (ICA/SUV) held its annual mid-year Section Bureau and strategy meeting at locations ranging from Vienna and Uppsala to Dundee and Reykjavik , the Section Bureau was privileged to hold its 3-4 February 2011 meeting at the Paris offices of the ICA Secretariat.
The location provided an opportunity to get to know all of the ICA staff members and especially to hear from David Leitch and Christine Martinez about current developments and how the SUV can fit in the developing future directions of the ICA.
As part of ongoing oversight of SUV programmes and business, the Section Bureau (SB) reviewed the status of its committees, including plans for consolidating and repopulating its Publicity and Publications Committees. Plans were reviewed for the July 2011 SUV conference in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), and options for the SUV presence at the 2014 ICA Congress.
In addition, there were preliminary discussions about possible SUV conferences in 2013 (Western Hemisphere) and in 2014 (northern Europe). The Paris SB meeting took official recognition of E-mail votes it had taken since its last regular meeting. These votes had approved two sets of guidelines for use with Proposal Submissions for SUV annual conferences and for the establishment of a Review Committee to provide for a blind review of programme proposals. Taken together, these guidelines, and a forthcoming revision of SUV’s Conference Planning Guidelines will help move SUV to a more regularized and professionalized process for developing its conference programmes.
The meeting also gave SB members an opportunity to commend the recent publication of a handbook on the Management and Preservation of Scientific Records and Data which provides a pragmatic approach with case studies to develop a strategy for selection of records of scientific research. The handbook, available to ICA members, is the result of a Programme Commission project, and it constitutes the concluding work of SUV’s Committee on Scientific and Research Data (CSRD) chaired by Renata Arovelius.
Finally, the SB meeting looked to future SUV activities including establishment of a committee to manage the newly created Section newsletter, the drafting of an amendment on inclusiveness to put forward to the next ICA Annual General meeting, and the initiation of a project to create an on-line database to serve as a ready reference to bio-bibliographic information about no longer living individuals whose careers and accomplishments had made foundational contributions to archival theory and practice in their respective national traditions.
Following the regular SB meeting, the ICA Secretariat and the Polish Academy of Sciences in Paris hosted a working meeting of the SUV’s Student Records Project, an effort funded by the Programme Commission to develop guidelines for the retention of and access to student records.