ARA Northern Region AGM
Location: Experience Barnsley, Town Hall, Church Street, Barnsley, S70 2TA
Time: 2pm
Attendees are invited to join the committee around 12.30pm for an informal lunch at The White Bear, 11 Church Street, Barnsley, S70 2AH. The White Bear is situated across the road from Barnsley Town Hall, where the business meeting will commence at 2pm.
Following the business meeting, attendees are welcome to join Paul Stebbing, Northern Region Vice Chair, for a short visit to Barnsley Council’s three new pop-up museums which are situated five minutes’ walk away in the new Glass Works shopping complex.
Papers:
A message from the Northern Region Chair - David Mander:
We are very pleased to announce our first face to face meeting since the COVID restrictions ended and look forward to welcoming you all at Experience Barnsley for our annual meeting on 28 April, with a chance to explore the future activities for our region, meet colleagues and be given a tour round Barnsley’s three new pop-up museums. You can also join the committee for lunch in advance of the meeting – details on the attached programme.
Since the meeting in March on archive service sustainability, the Committee have been busy planning a future meeting programme. Our online Teams sessions have been successful and have drawn in audiences from other ARA nations and regions, so we will continue with these, but also hope to add on face to face sessions. We have made some progress with our long-planned session on Collections and Diversity, which is now planned for September at a venue in York. Invitations will go out to the region in the first instance, but as the topic is of wider interest we will then open up to all ARA members. As the session will include paid speakers, we will have to charge for this meeting, in line with ARA policy, but charges will be kept to a low level.
We have also teamed up with the ARA’s Chief Archivists in Local Government to plan a session on opening up closed records. This isn’t just an issue for the national offices, some of whom we hope will be contributing presentations to an online meeting, but also for local and specialist services. Do we have systems in place to identify records that are ready to be placed on open access? Do we make enough of the contribution opening official records make to our democratic society? And could we gain more from publicising newly opened records? We are hoping to run this meeting in late May or early June – more news soon. We are still in discussion to set up a meeting on archives and museums, though as yet there is no date for this.
Members will all be aware that changes are planned to regions in England. A final decision is set to be made at the ARA Board in May. I have taken part in discussions on the changes and how they will be implemented and we will be preparing for new regional boundaries in advance of them coming into place on 1 October this year. I will be happy to take questions on the proposals at our annual meeting.
You will see we have a slot for our Diversity Allies to provide an update on national initiatives as part of our business meeting. John Chambers ARA’s CEO will also provide the latest on national activities.
We will also endeavour to provide information on the activities of our three regional partnerships – Archives for Yorkshire, the North East Archive Regional Partnership and the South Yorkshire Archive Partnership
David Mander
Chair ARA Northern Region.
April 2022