Building for the Future:  Creating an Infrastructure to Preserve ALL-SIS Records

Each year another store of invaluable material is added to the ALL-SIS archive:  minutes of meetings complete with marginalia, leader biographies, e-mails elucidating policy decisions and ribbons commemorating 25 years of ALL-SIS to name just some of this year’s contributions. It is a treasure trove for future researchers and AALL enthusiasts. There are challenges, however to collecting and preserving what will one day be history but currently masquerades as the ephemera of the work-a-day world. E-mails, records of informal discussions and telephone conversations slip through the cracks and are lost. So much depends on the individual efforts of committee chairs and members to collect, save and send a record of the year’s business. These individuals have always done a remarkable job and have taken their preservation responsibilities very seriously. To some degree an archive will always depend on such contributions, but in order to preserve as much as possible I believe it’s time to do some brainstorming about how we go about collecting ALL-SIS records for preservation. To that end I propose the following suggestions for discussion:

Automatic E-mail Archiving

Despite its persistence in the bowels of your hard-drive e-mail is an easy thing to overlook. At the same time, e-mail has also become the medium of a great deal of business. To keep as complete record of e-mails as possible I suggest creating an archive e-mail account and copying all e-mail correspondence to that account as the e-mail is sent. Further, all “born digital” publications could also be sent to the archive e-mail. This automatic e-mail archiving would not take the place of the e-mails copies sent to the archives at the end of the year but would supplement it. AALL-SIS does not provide e-mails to its officers. If it did then a system could be set up that any e-mail sent to or from AALL-SIS chair could be forwarded to the archive automatically. As it is, the success of this system would depend on members remembering to copy the archive e-mail address in their correspondence.

Conference Calls and Other Telephone Communication

A telephone call is sometimes the quickest way to get something done, but unless minutes are taken the information in the call is lost. I suggest including a computer on all conference calls so that a recording can be made. Currently software is evolving to be able to make transcriptions of voice recordings, but the technology is not there yet. Even so, having a recording to be upgraded to a transcript as soon as the technology permits, would add a new dimension to the archive. A computer could also record more informal phone calls that concerned AALL-SIS business at the discretion of the participants. The hope would be that including a computer that records the conversation would be easier than taking minutes and sending those minutes to the archives.

The benefits of these two innovations would include a more complete record. Also if the system were sufficiently efficient the archived e-mail and phone calls could be used as a back up for committee members who misplaced their e-mail, missed the teleconference or simply need to refresh their memories of a discussion. The way we communicate is changing and we must take thought to what those changes will entail for preserving a record. Of course, these proposals would require some initial investment to set up an archive e-mail and to find and set up a computer to record conference calls. A bigger obstacle could well turn out to be convincing members to habituate themselves to making use of these archiving techniques. The goal of these suggestions is to promote discussion about how AALL-SIS intends to curate its record and to consider ways to build preservation into our infrastructure. I welcome your comments and suggestions as to how we can continue to create and preserve our archive.