Meeting Minutes for a Steering Committee
Writing meeting minutes for the BC ELN Steering Committee was a multi-step process quite different from taking minutes at my student organizations at UBC. This was for one of BC Electronic Library Network’s Steering Committee meetings. It was a multi-step process involving the following action items:
- Participating in an Agenda Walk detailing speaking notes for the meeting
- Jotting minutes at the live meeting (held over Zoom)
- Cleaning notes post-meeting
- Reviewing previous meeting minutes formatting and how to set up an unpublished version of the document on the Drupal website for BC ELN
- Sending a draft to my supervisor, the Executive Director of BC ELN
- Sending a revised draft to the BC ELN portion of the Steering Committee
- Creating a final draft and publishing it on the website
- Sending out the final draft as a link to 2 listservs
These steps took several weeks, which is longer than I expected. I had recorded meeting minutes for school clubs and organizations but had never experienced this kind of multi-step process. This was great experience for me, as I was able to see how a proposal is presented in a diverse group of organizational representatives, including someone from the BC Ministry of Education. I observed how a formal vote was conducted and recorded, and the format for recording members’ verbal commentary during the meeting. The end result, of course, was much more concise than my initial notes taken during the live meeting.
Image from Flickr licensed under CC
Managing Inboxes for Various Service Areas
One wouldn't think that taking over an email inbox was an opportunity, but it was a helpful learning experience. In the absence of staff members managing Arca, BC Historical Digitization Project, and AskAway, I was responsible for their inboxes while they were away, from periods ranging from a couple of days to a week.
Through this experience, I got a chance to see what kinds of requests, questions, and news were received in each service area and practice correspondence where applicable. For example, I was sent a request from a librarian taking leave from AskAway to be removed from a listserv, so I learned how to login as an administrator and change these settings.
Aside from emails, I would look to past email correspondence for how to structure email responses, how to solve certain types of problems, and what kinds of problems might occur within that service.
Overall, I am glad I had the opportunity to attend a Steering Committee Meeting and be given responsibility for writing up the notes. As academic librarianship will inevitably involve meetings with organizations outside of university libraries, having written a formal meeting minutes document will prepare me for these events. It was also good experience to see how members’ conducted themselves during the meetings, who was steering the conversation, and how people expressed their opinions on various topics. While I had first seen writing meeting minutes as a simple task, I quickly realized its importance when reviewing past minutes, how critical it is to format it in a way that is concise but with enough context to understand the message, and the importance of sending out the summary in a timely manner while thoughts are fresh in the minds of participating members.