Minutes of British & Irish Sound Archives (BISA) Annual General Meeting held on 16 May 2014, at Fiontar, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Republic of Ireland
1. To Receive Minutes of Previous Annual General Meeting held on 17 May 2013 at the Manx Museum, Kingswood Grove, Douglas, Isle of Man, IM1 3LY
The minutes were accepted as a true record. Simon Rooks (SR) duly signed the minutes.
2. Committee Members’ Reports
Convenor - Simon Rooks (SR) thanked Fiontar for hosting this year’s event, BISA’s eleventh, which he described as a good day. SR hoped that it had met Fiontar’s needs. SR explained that Brian Rice (BR) was standing down from the BISA committee after seven years. He thanked BR for all his hard work for BISA. SR explained that as a result of BR stepping down from the committee, that there was now a vacancy and invited volunteers to come forward. Post AGM note: Grace Toland of the Irish Traditional Music Archive volunteered to join the BISA committee. This was unanimously agreed by the committee.
Secretary - Jonathan Draper (JD) explained that prior to the event in Dublin, BISA had 105 members.
Treasurer - Dafydd Pritchard (DP) stated that there was £1,870.00 in BISA’s bank account prior to this year’s annual event. This was a drop of £999.59 compared to the same time in 2013. This was a consequence of high expenses incurred by the location of BISA’s 2013 event on the Isle of Man.
Webmaster - Richard Ranft (RR) encouraged members to add content to BISA website. There was some discussion about adding presentations. BR agreed to liaise with the speakers at this year’s event. It was noted that BISA didn’t include sound recordings of the presentations on the website.
Listowner - Will Prentice (WP) reported that there were 165 members of BISA’s JISCmail discussion list. WP invited delegates and BISA members in general to write e-mails to the discussion list.
3. BISA Directory
SR promoted the directory and encouraged people to add their details. He suggested that the area covered by BISA should be divided into regions, which could then be assigned to BISA’s committee members so they could encourage sound archive repositories in that region to add their details to the directory. There was a discussion prompted by Alistair Bell of the National Library of Scotland about the relationship between BISA members and entries on the directory. SR, JD and others suggested that the two should be synonymous. RR explained that it was possible for those who applied for login details to the directory could automatically acquire membership. JD mentioned that as directory entries would be completed by Full Institutional members of BISA some mechanism would be required for the three others types of membership. There was also some discussion, prompted by DP, about commercial members. He explained IASA’s approach to sponsorship. It was decided to not pursue this at the present time and that the focus should be on holders of publicly accessible sound archive collections.
4. Any Other Items of Business
There were no other items of business.
5. Date and Time of Next BISA Conference
SR explained that there had been one offer of a venue, but invited other offers. No date was set for BISA’s 2015 event. SR mentioned that the BISA committee placed great importance on visiting various parts of the region covered by BISA and noted that each event tended to attract delegates from that area who had not been to a previous BISA event.
The meeting ended at 17:35.