VIVA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS COMMITTEE
MINUTES

Present: Gail McMillan, Ned Berkeley and Betsy Pittman.
Absent: Kay Domine, Paul Koda, Nancy Marshall and John Kneebone.

1. Project proposals

   It was agreed that we should continue our current practice of establishing broad guidelines and slightly narrower parameters to allow individual institutions to determine which collections would be most appropriate for electronic access. Although the Civil War materials are always popular (and copyright isn't as much of a problem), it was decided to wait for the results of the faculty survey (to be conducted this Spring) before embarking on such a diverse project.

   It was agreed that a regional approach would be best. Each institution would choose a collection (or collections) of merit whose research potential would be enhanced by electronic access. The collection will be twentieth century and of significance to the region in which the institution is located. In this manner, SCC continues to be inclusive in its coverage without overwhelming the staff responsible for actually doing the work. Each repository will begin with a guide (register, index) and provide links to significant documents (full text). This procedure will allow the committee members to further develop appraisal standards for electronic collections and make significant portions of collections available electronically (not everything in a collection is worth scanning). In conjunction with this project and working thesaurus would be developed that would expand as future projects demand, enabling us to e\develop a powerful tool to further connect related collections across the Commonwealth.

   Individual budgets and narrative proposals, which will then be merged into one document with appendices, are due at the next meeting. Figures for hardware components to be based on handouts provided by Gail at the 3/8 meeting.

2. It was recommended that we ask Elizabeth Roderick to speak to the committee about scanning work done at LVA. We will try to schedule out July meeting to take place at the LVA (new building).

3. Discussed the Rare Book School and CETH workshops. Both address areas of interest and do not really overlap. Time commitment is the committee's primary concern (RBS - 1 week, CETH - 2 weeks). Both will be investigated further.

   Gail also suggested that VIVA bring Anne Kenney (Director of the Cornell Workshop) to Virginia for an abbreviated version of the one week workshop (2 days?). Her report on the Cornell workshop is forthcoming.

4. Gail and Betsy will be presenting a session on VIVA Special Collections at the Spring 1996 meeting of MARAC on 5/3/96. Betsy will be giving a shorter presentation to the Virginia Caucus of MARAC on 3/15/96.

5. Letter to the history faculty of Virginia high schools and colleges will go out this Spring.
6. Discussion of long term plans established the following plan of action:
   • ongoing -- development of appraisal/selection criteria and thesaurus.

   • 96-97 Significant regional collection(s) with full text portion(s).

   • 97-98 Establishment of subject/course responsive materials available electronically in response to faculty survey.

   • 98-99 Development of Virginia portraiture database.

7. John has notified the committee that information for the Directory has been entered for repositories beginning with A-B.

8. Betsy will represent SCC at the next Steering Committee meeting (3/14, Charlottesville).

The next meeting of the SCC is scheduled for Thursday, May 2, 1996 at 5 p.m. at the Spring 1996 meeting of MARAC in College Park, Maryland.

Respectfully submitted,
Betsy Pittman, Chair