Ala Council report–Chapter 2

Sunday morning I was up bright and early for the ALA Council/Executive Board/Membership Information Session. The Budget and Analysis Committee (BARC) report by Marilyn Hinshaw was detailed and informative.  The challenges facing ALA in this year of serious inflation have been considerable.  The Endowment Fund Report by Chair Robert Newlen was also informative and encouraging.  Despite a highly volatile market, the endowment fund only declined by 1.7% during the past year. 

Immediately following this meeting was the ALA/APA Council meeting.:  Revenue results for ALA-APA we said to have fallen short by about $11,000. There seems to be a feeling that the viability of ALA/APA, the lobbying arm of ALA, is tenuous.

The rest of the morning was taken up with the first regular Council Meeting.  Resolutions Committee Chair, Peter McDonald, presented a significant revision to the guidelines for developing Council Resolutions. The new, redesigned ALA web site is expected to be launched in September 2008.  Preview site:  http://staging.ala.org/home.cfm  Efforts are underway to reduce the length of Mid Winter and Annual Meetings for Council as early as 2010 so that Council sessions could end on Tuesday rather than Wednesday. During the afternoon I went through a small section of the exhibits and in the evening attended the ALA President’s reception. Later I attended a private screening of WALL-E the new Pixar movie at Disneyland, courtesy of MovieLicensing USA.

Nancy Wilson

I am delighted to continue to serve as your representative on the ALA Council. Here is a report on my first day at this year’s conference in Anaheim, California.

After the councilor’s orientation on Saturday morning my first business meeting was the Chapter Relations meeting Saturday afternoon. This is a meeting of the Chapter Relations Committee and the staff of the chapter office in Chicago. The office is in charge of all dealings with chapters. This is the office you might call if you needed some advice from ALA about library issues. During this meeting I listened to reports from various divisions of ALA and caught up with chapter news. Some important highlights were the extension of the Capwiz advocacy website to all states and reports from officers of various ALA divisions.

 Immediately following the chapter relations meeting was our first membership meeting.  The primary agenda item was the report of Janet Swan Hill of the Task Force on Electronic Member Participation.  It was not only received well, but seconded by practically every remark uttered.  The urging was for full fledged electronic member participation to begin ASAP. The Membership Meeting also approved unanimously a “Resolution on Improving the Federal Depository Library Program and Public Access to Government Information”.

I’ll post more shortly.

Nancy Wilson