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Annual Meeting of Digital Scriptorium, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 23 September 2016
(photos by Matthew Heintzelman) |
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Digital
Scriptorium
October News
On Friday September 23, 2016 Digital Scriptorium held its
annual all-day meeting of the membership at Houghton Library, Harvard
University, in Cambridge, MA. The annual meeting this year was exciting for
several reasons:
1. It
coincided with the opening of the Beyond
Words exhibition of illuminated manuscripts in Boston area collections,
held at three separate venues: Harvard, Boston College, and the Gardner Museum.
2.
The same Beyond Words exhibition helped to
encourage interest in DS membership among Boston institutions. At the meeting:
·
Tufts University officially joined DS
·
New York Academy of Medicine became a non-voting
Associate
·
Wellesley College sent a representative who
attended as a potential member
3.
DS members approved new Bylaws, Articles of
Incorporation, and a legal Action of the Board to incorporate DS as a 501c3
tax-exempt organization. This means that DS will soon be eligible to receive
tax-deductible donations, apply for government supported grants, and operate as
an independent non-profit organization with all the legal protections and
privileges that status incurs. We are grateful to the St. Louis based Volunteer
Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts who assigned to us a pro-bono corporate
lawyer to help us through the requirements of non-profit organization.
Presentations were made about:
·
new cataloging and research tools implemented at
the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library
·
new appointments and tasks for the DS Advisory
Council
·
progress made on the Broken Books project
·
the Digging into Data Challenge and the
possibilities of CC0 licensing of DS records
·
the potential for use of authority control of
names,
·
a membership strategy based on regional analysis
of the Conway-Davis directory and inspired by the Digital Public Library of
America.
In attendance were: Christopher Barbour (Tufts), Debra
Cashion (Saint Louis U), Lisa Fagin Davis (Medieval Academy), Consuelo Dutschke
(Columbia), Lynne Grigsby (UC Berkeley), Matthew Heintzelmann (Hill Museum and
Manuscript Library), Janine Pollock (Free Library Philadelphia), Ruth Rogers
(Wellesley), E.C. Schroeder (Yale), Barbara Shailor (Yale), William Stoneman
(Harvard), Elizabeth Teviotdale (Western Michigan), Vanessa Wilkie (Huntington),
Cherry Williams (UC Riverside). Lynn Ransom (UPenn) was absent due to illness.
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| DS Board of Directors with signed Action of the Board to incorporate as a tax-exempt 501c3 non-profit. From left to right: Janine Pollock (Deputy Director), E.C. Schroeder (Treasurer), Vanessa Wilkie (Director At Large), Consuelo Dutschke (Director at Large), Debra Cashion (Executive Director), Cherry Williams (Director at Large). |
We have great news to share with our members, associates, and friends, and just in time for the holidays! Since last February the Board of Directors has been working on the reorganization of DS in order to become a tax-exempt non-profit organization. After extensive work on the Mission Statement and Bylaws, we sought out legal support from Volunteer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts in St. Louis. VLAA assigned to us a pro-bono lawyer who revised the Bylaws to make them legally sound. The new Bylaws were approved by the membership at the annual meeting at Harvard's Houghton Library on 23 September 2016. Since then we have filed Articles of Incorporation as a non-profit organization, and these have been certified by the State of Missouri.
