Relations with Outside Bodies

Relations with outside bodies

1^st and 2^nd Deposits

The University had been concerned for some time that its most recent deposit of archival material with PRONI had never been catalogued, and AGARM was keen to redress this matter.  PRONI is Northern Ireland’s major record repository, and as the University is a major public institution, it was seen as desirable that certain material should be lodged there, where it would be readily available to researchers. It would not be desirable in the long term to lose the storage facilities which PRONI will be able to provide as our Archive grows, nor to lose the opportunity to make use of the advice and expertise which PRONI staff have always been willing to offer our new service, but there seemed little point in continuing to leave material there which they did not have the staff resources to deal with. Fortunately PRONI has now been able to recruit extra staff, and Dr David Lammey, in charge of acquisitions, assigned one of these, Dr Ann McVeigh, to the task of cataloguing the second deposit.  This task has now been completed and it has been agreed to merge the two deposits and to produce a single catalogue.

Contacts with PRONI have resulted in the Archivist being invited to join the Information Managers’ Forum, a PRONI-led group of information and records managers from government departments and publicly-funded bodies throughout Northern Ireland.  This meets regularly to consider issues of common interest, including the implications of data protection and freedom of information legislation. The meeting of this group in September 2003 was held on the Coleraine campus.

Mr McLaughlin has also been a member of the Archives Policy for Northern Ireland Group, under the auspices of the Department of Culture Arts and Leisure, established to consider archives provision in Northern Ireland in line with similar groups in the rest of the United Kingdom. He attended a workshop in Carrickfergus, and then was a member of an offshoot group on records management.