News

Recently we have been looking at how to improve our communications with our members. We are pleased to announce that these improvements have been achieved:

Change of Generic E-mail Address for the AfELG Committee

There is a new e-mail address to which you can send your queries, suggestions or requests for advice or information. The SoA web-mail provider has provided this new address for us, which is afelg@archives.org.uk. Please note that with immediate effect the old Hotmail address is defunct.

E-mail Distribution List

The committee now has a more effective distribution tool in the form of an e-mail mailing list. Again, this has been arranged through the SoA's web-mail provider. This means that we can simultaneously contact the majority of our members by e-mail with news and notices of events. This will help us to economise on the cost of group mailings, as well as reduce the amount of paper we produce.

We do receive notice of changes in the contact details of members from the Society's Head Office in Taunton, but despite this we still get a lot of messages returned from members' email addresses as undeliverable. Please ensure that we have your correct e-mail address in our records or you could miss out on something.

One word of warning, though, if responding to any such e-mail communication, please be sure to send your reply in a new message to afelg@archives.org.uk rather than replying directly to the message you have received.

Newsletter

In accordance with our efforts to reduce both our costs and the volume of paper we use, we will be producing our newsletter in electronic format in future. Each new issue will be uploaded to this section of the website and members will be notified of its publication by e-mail. However, those members for whom we do not have an e-mail address will continue to receive their copy of the newsletter and other communications in hard copy by post.

The latest issue should now be attached below. Please accept our apologies for the delay in getting this issue out to members; it has been a result of the changes in membership of the committee, the new communications initiatives and the volume of membership change notifications from Head Office.

Discussion Forum

Some members may remember that in 2005 a JISCmail listserve for AfELG was established. This has been rediscovered and revived. It is intended to serve as a discussion forum for members of AfELG and anyone else in the wider culture and learning communities who is interested in the use of archives in education and learning.

It works the same way as the Archives-NRA  listserve, so you will need to register yourself on the JISCmail system via the JISCmail homepage (www.jiscmail.ac.uk) if you do not already have an account. Then you can subscribe to the AfELG listserve by visiting its homepage within the JISCmail website http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/AFELG-DIS.html. You can also search previous postings to the list there.

It is optional of course, but we encourage members to join this list because it has the potential to be a valuable tool for members to share news, knowledge and experience with each other and with people who are not AfELG members or are not working in archive repositories. It is free and is not likely to generate a vexatious volume of postings, as can be the case with other listserves.

For very important announcements, we will post information here and send e-mail messages to our mailing list, as well as to both the Archives-NRA list and the AFELG-DIS list, so we apologise in advance for any cross-postings.

Feedback

The committee welcomes any feedback on these developments. Please send comments to afelg@archives.org.uk.

Last modified 05/08/2009