Present:

The meeting was called to order at 8:10am by the Chair, Tatjana Lorkovic

I. Welcome and Introductions

II. Project business

1. Minutes of the November 21, 2003 meeting were approved.

2. New members of the Executive Committee were introduced: Leena Siegelbaum, secretary and Cathy Zeljak, member-at-large, both will serve for 2002-2004. Tatjana Lorkovic and June Ferris will rotate off the Committee.

3. Elections will be held by e-mail in 2004. Simon explained that by-law amendments would be necessary to allow voting via e-mail. The amendments will be voted on by e-mail.

III. Budget report, CRL news (James Simon)

1. Simon reported that SEEMP had a beginning balance of $48,274 FY 2003. The FY 2003 revenues were $21,000 and the expenses $38,223. Current fiscal year revenues are $18,000 and the expenses $2,605. With a beginning balance of $31,050 the ending balance (9/30/03) is $46,445. The available funds on that date are $7,118. The deadline for new proposals is in February.

2. The CRL website (and SEEMP listserv) is now a collaborative workspace and allows on line discussion. Documents are available on this site and have replaced mailed documents. Access will be for project members only.

3. International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON). CRL is administering a grant from NEH to preserve and provide access to international newspapers. In the current round of funding (2002-2004), ICON is preserving nine Slavic titles from Bosnia, Romania, Hungary, Georgia, Croatia, and Slovenia from the collection of Columbia University. A new grant proposal was submitted for 2004-2006, including three Slavic titles.

4. CRL was awarded funds from the Mellon Foundation for an eighteen-month effort to investigate the curatorial, technical, and long-term management issues of capturing and preserving Web-based political communications. The curatorial investigation has been developing a curatorial collection policy statement and selection guidelines, and discussing recommendations for the ideal methodologies of timing, typology, and access policies. The technical team is assessing existing harvesters and archival systems and pursuing a detailed exploration of metadata extraction and potential access mechanisms for archived material. In doing so the groups conducted a series of tests featuring important political Web sites from the targeted regions (Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and left-wing European political groups) using a collection of archived sites from the Internet Archive and pages gathered using other capture technologies.

A plenary conference was held November 19, 2003, in Washington, D.C. to discuss preliminary findings. In attendance were project personnel, staff from the Library of Congress, stakeholders in electronic preservation, and a number of faculty members in the fields of social sciences to provide feedback on the use and access requirements of such an archive. Conference results and the final recommendation report will be issued in the coming months.

5. Global Resources Program, an AAU/ARL project is now named Global Resources Network. CRL is discussing the possibility with ARL of taking over the administration of the veteran projects within this (the German Resource Project and the Latin American Research project). One of the original projects in the GRN was related to Slavic resources (proposed by the University of Kansas), but it did not get off the ground.

IV. Progress reports on current projects

1. Newspapers from the Former Yugoslavia (Janet Crayne)
CRL now has Oslobodenje, (the weekly Ljubljana edition) from 1994-1996. Janet reported that a filmer in Sarajevo is offering the Sarajevo daily version from the war years (1992-1995) on 17 reels. She proposed that CRL acquire the newspaper also for year 1996 to date. The committee approved a motion to pursue the acquisition of this material.

2. Newspapers of the October Revolution (Michael Neubert)
Due to lack of staff no work had been done on this project. LC may have to return $500 to CRL unless the money can be spent. The action item discussed last year to check existing Norman Ross film for these titles was not acted on.

3. Russian archival guides (Jared Ingersoll)
There has been confusion with the contract to microfilm the guides. Apparently a person without the proper authority originally signed it. The Russian Society of Archivists does not want EastView to have the right of resale of the films. A decision needs to be made of whether each reel should have one title or several. The committee then generally agreed that several titles per reel would be acceptable if there were complete bibliographic records. University of Kansas has a project to digitize the guides to provide wider access while the CRL filming project would be for preservation. The Russians want to link the two projects, but EastView is reluctant. The negotiations continue and Dima Frangulov (EastView) stated that they would know within the next couple of weeks if the filming can begin.

4. Russian regional newspapers (Dima Frangulov )
Titles up to and including 2000 will be filmed by the end of 2003. Titles of 2001-2005 are being filmed as published.

5. Russian right-wing extremist press (James Simon)
Phases 1 and 2 have been completed. There is no title-by-title access to this collection but a guide is accessible online at http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/SEEMP/collections/seempextremist.htm

6. Politika, Beogradske novine (Tatjana Lorkovic)
Yale has had the missing issues of these titles filmed in Serbia. The films are of poor quality and need to be refilmed.

V. New proposals/Developing projects

1. Pre-revolutionary Journals Digital Access project (PJDA) (Miranda Remnek)
The initial proposal was submitted in 2001. The question was whether to resubmit the proposal. Another question was coordination of the costs of the project and possible outsourcing of the digitization. PJDA will do a start-up project of a few titles (time frame?). While the journals are widely available in print and microform the digitization should be done from the hard copy to ensure the best quality.

Another title for possible filming or digitization is Peterburgskii listok . Could SEEMP be approached with this project? Simon commented that CRL now has a librarian specializing in digitization and thus has more interest in carrying out digital projects.

2. Nadia Zilper commented that University of North Carolina has acquired a unique collection of Russian military journals, which could be a project for digitization. Miranda commented that PJDA could carry out start-up projects, but funding for full work needs to come from outside sources, as they are expensive.

3. Provincia Russica (Dima Frangulov)
He had not received a list of possible duplicates of titles already filmed by Norman Ross. The Russians are not showing much enthusiasm for this project. The committee agreed to drop this from consideration.

4. New proposals from the floor
Nadia Zilper announced that University of North Carolina had acquired a Russian collection which includes some unique serials runs of military journals which she thinks would be better digitized than filmed as the material is very brittle. She will submit a proposal for this project.

Tatiana Lorkovic reported that Yale has preserved a 19th journal (Kamerturskii zhurnal???) dealing with the activities of the tsars.

A discussion ensued as to whether SEEMP should anticipate future research needs, inclusion of Central Asian titles and whether the focus of SEEMP should be on preserving rare, seldom used materials or widely held publications.

Submitted by Leena Siegelbaum