Beverly Archive Project  Minutes

January 7, 2010

The Beverly Archives Project (BAP) held its regular meeting at 7 PM at the Beverly Public Library,  chaired by Charlie Wainwright. 

Present were:           

1. Welcome : Dot Chika, who read the meeting notice in the paper, attended to find out what we were all about.

2. Minutes:   The minutes to the December meeting were approved.

3. Treasurers Report: The Treasurers Report was reviewed and approved.  After delivering a check , payable to Browns River, to City Hall, the current balance is $755.16. 

4. Library Presentation – Slide Review/Feedback  -  While Carol’s portion of the presentation isn’t completely flushed out yet, Cristina presented her half.  The presentation is tentatively titled “Hints for Archiving your Personal Collections” It will be about 45 minutes in length w/ 15 minutes at the end for questions.   Cristina asked if anyone thought she should make the background of the presentation the same color(s) as the web site and use the BAP logo.  The colors of the web site were an arbitrary choice of Charlie’s when he set it up but Barbara will email Cristina the BAP logo.   Carol and Cristina will do a final walk thru of the presentation at next month’s meeting.  Once it is complete, Charlie would like to put it on the web site, he would also like to try doing some sort of audio voice over.  Carol suggested Bev Cam’ing it. Dot thought we should do additional presentations for other city groups as well 

5. City Hall Exhibit:  Charlie and John briefly recapped the meeting they, Terry and Margaret had with Wes Slate and Sue Goganian in December at Beverly City Hall. Similar to when Wes came to the November BAP meeting, the topics were signage with in city hall as well as what could be done to leverage the history of city hall.   The idea of an exhibit on the history of City Hall, to be placed in the stairwell at the front of the building, was discussed. The exhibit would focus on the history of the building and would utilize all 3 floors of the stairwell.  As this effort was the result of a city council order that expired at year end, Wes prepared a memo in late December to the Council President requesting the order be extended into the New Year.  We now need to wait for the order to be officially extended/brought forward; presumably a committee will be formed consisting of city council members, historical society members, BAP members and others to work on this effort.

It was noted that it seems that BAP is beginning to get visibility within the City, our TBD City Council and Feb. 21^st Monday Morning presentations will add to it.

Charlie though it would be a good idea for BAP members to have an ‘elevator speech’ about the organization ready for when someone asks about the group.  To that end, it was requested that everyone attending the February meeting come with their version of an elevator speech prepared, we will read them aloud to each other and come up w/ something for the group.  Also it was suggested that a business card template be designed and any member could print them for themselves with the BAP logo and a BAP email address.

 Thinking long term, we should look at ‘branding’ the web site and maybe colorize the logo.    

6. Strengthening Collaborative ties -  Charlie would like to explore what we could do in collaboration with the Historical Society.  Charlie will be speaking to them when he asks about them hosting our February meeting.  Charlie offered to host the meting after that at his Church.  Carol reminded everyone that if we change the meting venue she needs to know with enough time to get the updated meeting notice in the paper.

John received an email from the Library, they are looking for a volunteer to do newspaper indexing for 2 hours a week.  Barbara thought she might know an Endicott student who would be interested, Charlie was going to asks some of his church members and Carol was going to pass the request around Gordon College. 

7. Reports of Committees/Activities

a.      City Hall project -    We believe we have identified all of the items and are now organizing like things with like.  Also our second newspaper article was published in the December 24^th edition of the Beverly Citizen

b.      John threw out a question to the group: How much info do we capture in our finding aid?  People who signed it, everyone who is mentioned in it? Do we capture the info now or will it be someone else’s job to come back and fill in the details? -  No firm answer/decision was made

c.       Polly asked about storing documents and related photos together.  Both Barbara and Cristina suggested that the because of potential differing preservation needs the documents and photos not be physically stored together but the finding aid should be indexed in such a way that when a search is made all relevant items are retrieved together.

d.      Now that our second article has been published, we have set an expectation with the Citizen for additional articles.  Charlie again requested that everyone draft a small article, 100/150 words.  Charlie has volunteered to edit them/ put them in newspaper form.

8. Our next meeting will be held Thursday February 4th   at 7:00 p.m.. We are tentatively scheduled to meet at the Beverly Historical Society.

Respectfully submitted:        Margaret Alfonso

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