Professional Development

Yesterday, Wanda, Prentice, and I attended a class, “The Minute Taker’s Workshop” offered through the PDC (Professional Development Center) here at Wake Forest. The workshop was intended to help a person know his or her role as minute taker and to learn the best techniques for producing accurate and informative minutes.

During the first half of the class we discussed the purpose of minutes, the tasks expected of you as a minute taker at the meeting, and some of the issues and problems that arise for the minute taker at meetings. During the open discussion it became apparent that many of the people there shared the same problems a few of which were; how do I know what’s important enough to records in the minutes and what isn’t and how do I take minutes of something when I don’t understand the topic they are discussing. The facilitator had guidelines to help on what to record and what not to record and that as a minute taker we should not be afraid to ask for clarification to make sure the minutes are accurate.

The second half of the class covered the writing of the rough draft and who should see it, proof reading to check on spelling and punctuation, and the filing of the final draft. It was recommended that the minutes be prepared immediately following the meeting because studies showed that immediately after listening to someone talk you can only recall 50% of what was heard and after a week the percentage drops to 10% and as a minute taker you should not depend on memory to recall important decisions.

The facilitator, Beth Malone, had good suggestions and made what could have been a boring class engaging and enjoyable.

Yesterday Craig and I attended the online class “Preserving Oral Histories” offered through Solinet.The class provided information on preserving existing and future oral histories and what challenges involved with reformatting and digitizing projects.

The instructor, Karen McClurken, started out my emphasizing the most obvious first; prevent your oral history from being erased. She then went into how to assess the condition of your existing oral histories. She showed three free Audiovisual surveys that can be used rank collections based on condition, level of existing deterioration, and risk of future deterioration associated with different formats. Next she covered caring for the master recording. She emphasized using the highest quality available for your original master and to use that master only to make new dubbing masters. Be sure to store the masters separately from the copies and master dubs and label oral histories consistently among the different formats. She covered methods for housing and storing the different format types and talked about what to consider when digitizing. A few things to consider when digitizing are compressed versus uncompressed, different audio and video formats, sample rates, and bit-depth. And of course there is always the digital rights permission you have to worry about.

The last 30 minutes Karen talk about what to think about for new oral histories.

· Will it be audio, video, or both? Audio will have less equipment while video there is lighting along with sound quality to consider.

· How much can you spend? Again, get the highest quality equipment you can afford. What equipment is needed will depend on the format that is chosen.

· What feature are most important and what format best help meet them?

· Can interviewer effectively use equipment? This is important so if the interviewer is uncomfortable with the equipment some training may be needed.

Overall the online class was interesting and I left with ideas that I hadn’t thought about or considered.