Information Committee of the Department of Biology

Minutes of the meeting held 16th May 2003 Present: Owen Atkin, Lorna Evans, Paul Waites, Julie Lord, Richard Firn (Chair), Ian Jennings. Cake: Experimental low-tech road surfacing

ICDB 03/8 Apologies for absence.

None. The order of the agenda was changed to allow JL to leave early. The order in these minutes do not reflect the true order.

ICDB 03/9 Minutes of the meeting 26/03/03.

These were accepted.

ICDB 03/10 Matters arising.

(i) ICDB 02/14 Room booking software. PW reported that no simple solution was yet to hand but the software being developed in the TF would be adopted if certain technical problems are resolved.
(ii) ICDB 03/4 York Extra. LE reported that links to and from the Bulletin were now in place.
(iii) ICDB 03/5 Bulletin. Resources Board had accepted the proposals from the ICDB. It was not clear whether they had fully taken on board the resource requirements, especially with regards editorship. LE was ready to continue collating and editing the material.
The Committee noted that the revised layout had been well received and thanked LE. It was agreed that further effort should be expended trying to get individuals to use the Bulletin instead of emailing everyone with Word or Excel documents.

ICDB 03/11 Budget

IJ presented his budget for the coming year (£47K). This was accepted by the committee. It was noted that the budget does not include any funding for the refurbishment of the teaching IT facilities - an additional 30K would be needed from other sources for new PCs for the expansion of the Teaching PC classroom.
(Click here to read Budget 2003 proposal: Biology staff access only).

ICDB 03.12 Data Protection Act - Departmental policy, procedures and training

RDF presented his documents (Click here for: ICDB Data protection discussion document & UoY Data Retention tables) which summarised the need to address many issues arising from the Data Protection Act. It is clear that:

• the Universities policies were virtually unknown within the department
• the department lacked its own policy
• the department lacked procedures to enable compliance
• there was a large amount of information in existence within the department that had been gathered and stored without adequate consideration of the Act.

The committee agreed that:

• a departmental policy should be devised and ready for implementation by the start of the new academic year
• that all the major administrators in the department will need to be consulted and involved in the development of the policy
• once the policy has been adopted, the administrative procedures in the department will have to be revised to ensure that compliance is simple and routine
• training will be required to ensure that everyone in the department knows what data is kept on them, under what conditions that information can be accessed and how they can access it
• that centrally provided software should be chosen to enable compliance to be easy and robust

It was agreed that the priority for implementation should be, in order:

• existing records/data from Oct 2003
• recent information applying to people currently employed/studying in the department
• old information applying to people who had once worked or studied in the department

The Chair was asked to start a process of developing the policy and procedures in consultation with the key administrators of the department. It was agreed that an audit of the data and records of the undergraduate office would help bring to the surface some general principles that could then be raised with the other key areas (postgraduates, personnel, finance, stores, safety, etc..)