I think an advisory board can be a great help if you need outside pressure and support in terms of politics in your organization. One difficulty of an advisory board is that you must often plan what you want them to do, to know, or how they operate with your situation. Our campus has a faculty committee titled the "Library Committee" and some years it has met monthly and others perhaps twice in the year. When we've had to "force" faculty to cut serials (or we would!) we've used this committee as a conduit to the faculty to help explain our problem between limited budgets, rising subscription prices, and need to weed out serials no longer pertinent to a curriculum. We did have a period where the Library Director was chairing the committee in order to control it, and came under campus ire in that faculty "advisory" committees could not be chaired by the officials of the agency they were "advising." So that can be a problem. Could an archives advisory committee change your policies, collections, acquisitions policies, etc.? Do you want that? Or do want a team of supporters who go out and make contacts and spread the word about your agency and services? Dean Dean DeBolt University Librarian, Special Collections John C. Pace Library, University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514-5750 850-474-2213 [log in to unmask] A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org. For the terms of participation, please refer to http://www.archivists.org/listservs/arch_listserv_terms.asp. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>