Council Meeting Minutes - Accessibility

With regards to archiving, I know that churches are asked to provide a copy of their minutes to the CRC archives. See more information here, as well as other advice about keeping congregational records. Hope this helps! Maybe others have advice about how their distribute the minutes within their congregations...

I'm running into similar questions in terms of setting up a system for managing our congregation's local archives, especially setting up electronic storage systems. In particular, I'm now debating the merits of various external hard drive and cloud storage options. From what I gather, it looks like there's a "rule of three": store things in three mediums, with one being geographically separate from the others. I'm thinking that looks like an electronic file of minutes would be archived in an external hard drive, cloud storage, and then printed for a physical binder/file.

The key challenge I've seen mentioned with electronic storage is that hardware/software has major updates every 5-7 years, so that's how often you need to update storage, e.g. buy a new external hard drive.

As far as distributing minutes to the congregation, our church posts a paper copy to a bulletin board with other news. Not high tech, but it's visible.

Good points, Amy, about the need for redundancy.

When it comes to cloud storage, I'm partial to Google Drive. It makes it easy to store files in the cloud and it takes only a second to add/remove people's access to the whole folder (as council members come and go). Plus they make it easy to batch-export everything so you can periodically save it to a local hard drive.

As a bonus, when council members get familiar with Google Drive/Docs there are a million other ways it can be used to collaborate.