Chair and Vice Chair responsibilities

Leadership terms

Rotation for TAC/UAC leadership goes as follows: a member serves a one year term as Vice Chair, which is followed by one year as Chair, totaling two years in leadership. 

Chair responsibilities

• Workload: The workload of the Chair position can vary throughout the year, depending on the needs of the council, its sub-teams and members. The first 3 months of a new term will typically require an increased time commitment to orient new members and assign sub-teams.

• Responsibilities:The Chair has primary responsibility for coordinating the work of the the council and communicating with stakeholders. This includes:

  • Assigning members to sub-teams. 

  • Welcoming and orienting new appointees.

  • Maintaining documentation and rosters on the wiki. Chairs should watch pages of the council handbook for any suggested changes.

  • Leading and facilitating council meetings.

  • Attending opposite councils meetings (i.e. the TAC Chair attends UAC meetings and vice versa).

  • Creating ad hoc working groups and initiating or sunsetting subteams in order to accomplish the work of the council.

  • Working with the Governance Board liaison to represent the council to the Board.

  • Collaborating with the ArchivesSpace Program Manager and ArchivesSpace Governance Board liaison to accomplish program initiatives by way of TAC/UAC Coordinating Committee meetings.

  • Preparing quarterly and annual reports summarizing the activities of the council and subteams to the Governance Board. See Yearly Timeline of Council Activities for details.

  • Serving on the Nominating Committee.

Vice Chair responsibilities

• Workload: The workload of the Vice Chair position doesn’t add too much – it’s mostly comprised of familiarizing yourself with the Chair duties to ensure a smooth transition in leadership at the end of the term. It might involve a couple of hours a month, depending on the month.

• Responsibilities:

  • Leading a few council meetings, probably 1-3 (less than half of the meetings in a year).

  • Attending the first opposite council meeting of term (i.e. the Vice Chair of UAC attends the first TAC Meeting of the year)

  • Collaborating with the Chair to plan meetings, making council-related decisions, helping support sub-teams. This typically happens over email and a couple of phone meetings. 

  • Attending TAC/UAC Coordinating Committee meetings. The Coordinating Committee serves to facilitate the sharing of information between the Technical and User Advisory Councils, planning of joint council activities, and sharing feedback from council members for the Governance Board.

  • Assess (in January) the attrition rate of councils over the next few terms (details forthcoming - this section under review)

  • Maintaining Awesome ArchivesSpace repo by responding to pull requests and issues and adding new resources at your discretion (TAC ONLY)

    • Original documentation for the Awesome ArchivesSpace project

    • Maintenance of the Awesome ArchivesSpace GitHub repository includes:

      • Baseline maintenance:

        • At the beginning of term, the incoming TAC Chair should assign repository permissions to the incoming Vice Chair if they are already part of the ArchivesSpace GitHub organization. If they are not, the Program Manager can assign them this permission level.

        • Set up personal notifications to be alerted to changes in the repository

        • Periodically merge open pull requests

        • Respond to and close open issues in the repository

      • Active engagement:

        • Creating new content

        • Soliciting new contributions from the ArchivesSpace community

        • Reviewing and correcting or removing broken links; in-depth review of the list recommended every two years

        • Potential re-arrangement of sections

        • Monitoring listservs and responding to relevant questions with links to documentation in the repository

        • Increasing the visibility of the content in the repository for the ArchivesSpace community