ArchivesSpace Governance Board - 4th Quarter Meeting update
Julia Novakovic
Dear ArchivesSpace members,
As the Chair of the ArchivesSpace Governance Board, I am writing to report on the group’s 4th Quarter meeting, which was held virtually on May 21.
We discussed an operations report that introduced Bridget Almas, the new Director of Community Supported Technologies at Lyrasis, and highlighted progress with planning for the Annual Member Forum and the next cohort for the ArchivesSpace Diversity Partnership. We also heard about the activities of the Technical Advisory Council and User Advisory Council and the excellent contributions they have made this year.
We reviewed the continued healthy financial position of ArchivesSpace. We approved the budget for the next fiscal year, with strong support for community engagement and development efforts and a new project to create an end-to-end test suite for the application.
We got an update on the Code of Conduct Review Task Force, which is working with a consultant to create core values statements and develop activities to engage the ArchivesSpace community. This work will also provide a helpful basis to orient people to different kinds of work in the community, along with the mission and guiding principles statements developed by the Board in the past.
We also discussed some issues related to the Board itself. In recent years there have been multiple instances when an elected Board member changed employment during their term. In some cases they remained in the ArchivesSpace member community but moved to an institution at a different membership level. In the past the bylaws were interpreted as saying the Board member would need to resign from their position. This deprived the Board of valuable expertise and organizational memory. As a possible remedy, the group discussed a potential bylaws change which would allow elected Board members to remain in their position until the end of their term as long as their employer was an ArchivesSpace member. This edit to Article V, Section 1 of the Bylaws was later proposed and approved over email. You can view the Bylaws for the Governance of ArchivesSpace here.
This is the last chair’s message of my term, and it has been a pleasure to serve as your Governance Board chair over the last year. It is wonderful to see and participate in the work our community does in so many different areas. I’d also like to thank Annie Benefiel, Natalie Adams, and Kat Stefko for their dedication to ArchivesSpace over the past few years on the Governance Board.
Please feel free to reach out directly to me or to your elected representative if you have feedback you would like to share.
All the best,
--Julia
Julia Novakovic (she/her)
Chair, ArchivesSpace Governance Board
Digital Archivist
RIT Archives
Rochester Institute of Technology
Wallace Library 3632
90 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623
https://www.rit.edu/archives/
jmn...@rit.edu
