The meeting was held in the Elliott University Center at UNC Greensboro.  Madeleine Perez served as meeting moderator, Barbara Tookey local arrangements coordinator and Suellyn Lathrop, secretary.

Mark Brittain, Lillian Brewington, Janis Holder, Pamela Ingle, Hal Keiner, Todd Kosmerick, Suellyn Lathrop, Ron Leach, Cat McDowell, Madeleine Perez, Gloria Pitts, Adina Riggins and Barbara Tookey present.

The meeting was convened at 11:00.

The group began with introductions around the table welcoming new comers Pam Ingle of the Department of Cultural Resources and Cat McDowell, electronic records archivist of UNCG. 

Ron Leach began his report on the UNC General Schedule by thanking Barbara Tookey for working on the draft.  Betsy Bunting has received the schedule and they are in the process of setting a meeting to review and discuss it.  A tentative date of June 23^rd has been set for the meeting.  Ron will keep us posted about this.  Once the schedule is approved by Betsy it will go to Stacy Meyer who is the Deputy Secretary and general counsel for the Department of Cultural Resources for review.  If there are changes from Betsy or Stacy they will come back to us either to the committee or to the group as a whole. 

Once there is an agreement the schedule will go first to Lisbeth Evans of DCR and then to Erskine Bowles for signatures.  The official copy will reside at DCR and will be posted on their website.  A discussion ensued about how the schedule would be sent out to the chancellors.  The general feeling is that it will carry more weight if it comes out as a directive from UNC General Administration.  DCR will probably also have a cover letter attached.  In addition to the copy that will be sent to the Chancellors, a hard copy will go to each institution's legal counsel, university archivist and records manager.

DCR will make changes as needed and notifying the archivists and records managers via the listserv.  We should also be sending information regarding updates to DCR as we notice that laws and policies change that could affect the schedule.  The general schedule should be used when there is no other schedule in place.  Existing program schedules take precedent over the general schedule, except where the retention time for a series is longer on the general schedule.

The next challenge is to work on program schedules for departments and records not addressed in the general schedule.  There are formatting issues to be resolved between the 16 campuses.  A discussion regarding using the general schedule table format for program schedules ensued.  If each school used the same format, there is a greater possibility of sharing information and dividing the task of writing program schedules.  Ron said that DCR is in the process of replacing the old SCHEDS database with something new.  He is open to the idea of giving us access to the database via the web.

After lunch the discussion of the creation of updates and notifications continued.  It will be made available in pdf form immediately.  Eventually a database format should be available for better searching.  DCR is looking at new software agency wide and are working on funding and approval of a system.  They are looking at the Georgia State Archives general schedule as a model.  The Georgia State Archives site is based on the same database as the Kent State University schedule, but the interfaces are different.  It was suggested that some instructions regarding search strategies for pdf format be included on the DCR website.  The schedule will include a table of contents.  Each campus can link directly to the schedule when it is up.

Ron will be working out an updating process.  There needs to be a way to track the changes made over time and a way to get signatures.  Updates should be almost automatic as laws and policies change.  We shouldn’t have to send the schedule back to a committee to be updated.  Each of us should keep Ron up to date regarding policy changes that affect the schedule to facilitate updating the schedule.  We can use the listserv to keep each other up to date.

We will try to have a meeting where we can all see the website prior to it going live so we can give our feedback.

Hal Keiner gave us a report on the Best Practices meeting which was held in Wilmington in March.  Hal reported that digital preservation is making headway and the standards for preservation are being put into place.  The next thing on the horizon will be institutional repositories for electronic records.  There are still many problems and concerns including storage issues.  The big problems will continue to be money and the continuous migration of electronic records to new formats.  Putting institutional repositories in place will force people to think about the metadata up front rather than after records are created.  Hal sees the use of older technologies such as computer output microfilm as a way to ensure the viability and authenticity of permanent and vital records into the future.  Another issue is that federal, state and local governments are behind other entities in technology.  It is falling to universities to store and maintain records created by government.  For more information regarding the conference and the topics discussed see the NC State Library’s website:

http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/digidocs/bestpractices/index.html

Hal then shared his power point presentation Appraisal of Electronic Records.  This will be posted on the UNC RM presentations website: http://www.ecu.edu/cs-lib/archives/present.cfm

Barbara Tookey shared with the group a new brochure she has created: An Employee’s Guide to Managing University Records.  She has graciously offered to make this available to all UNC records managers and archivists.  We can change the contact information to suit our needs.  It will be posted on the website as well:

http://www.ecu.edu/cs-lib/archives/train.cfm

There was a discussion of topics for the fall meeting.  It was suggested to Suellyn prior to this meeting that we ask Betsy Bunting, Janis Holder and Tim Pyatt to prepare a meeting regarding FERPA and student records and invite some archivists and records managers from private colleges in the state.  It was further suggested that the meeting cover best practices for electronic vital records.  Suellyn will work on getting a time and place for a meeting in September.

The meeting adjourned at 3:00.