A trip down IVSA memory lane
Pens, paper and landlines
This year IVSA saw its 62nd birthday! Another milestone reached since it was founded in 1953. Back then, just after the end of World War II, veterinary students were one of the groups who realized the need for a more friendly collaboration between people of different countries. Discussion was sparked during a conference in London and a mere year later, on the 6th of August 1953 in Gießen, Germany, IVSA (then called International Veterinary Students’ Union - IVSU) was born! Since then it has grown tremendously, from a small group of just 10 European countries to an association spanning over 40 countries on all continents.
Nowadays, even if we don't realize it, things are very different from what they used to be. Can you imagine the difficulty of keeping in touch with all the ExCo Officers and Secretaries, contacting all MO Presidents for exchanges or even just sharing the GA minutes in a time when there were no computers? There was no IVSA website or Facebook to share information, there was no GoogleDocs for Symposium and Congress applications and also no email to disseminate the GA agenda and other important documents.
So how did we manage to run an organization you ask?
Well, good old pen and paper for starters, and lots of it! In the early years of IVSAs existence invitations to the annual Congress (Symposium wasn't organized until the late 80s) were typed on fancy paper by typewriter and sent by airmail to all Member Organizations. MOs were asked to send the amount of expected students that would participate from their country, after which the OC would let the MOs know how many people they would be able to accept. The MOs got to choose their own delegates and then had to send yet another letter, communicating to the OC who would be attending. Every official letter required drafting, double-checking and then painstakingly being typewritten multiple times yet again (remember, copy machines also did not exist) so each MO could receive their own copy.
GA minutes faced the same challenges. Not only did the appointed secretary have to scrawl almost incomprehensible notes during GAs, he also had to create full minutes out of those notes. The minutes were then first sent to one or more ExCo officers (again by post) for approval, after which the whole cycle of retyping began to ensure separate copies for each MO. Busy student life meant delays often happened, and it took much longer than our current 30 days rule for minutes to be completed. Nevertheless, secretary after secretary managed to complete this daunting task.
The newsletters started off less sophisticated than what we are used to today – simple text had to do in the beginning – but soon they developed into compact, readable booklets. With no Public Relations Coordinator in the ExCo, these booklets were produced by a different MO each year and of course they all put a lot of effort into producing an entertaining read for all members. Some of these newsletters even made it to university libraries, where they can still be found today.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that computers first arrived on the scene for IVSA. Don’t assume they made everything better though – but this will be a good story for our next article!
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IVSA Journal/Fall, 2015