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

I was very pleased to be appointed to the Human Resources Development and Recruitment (HRDR) Committee which is an advisory committee and meets once at each conference to advise the HRDR Office in the Chicago offices of ALA. Lorelle Swader is the director of the office which oversees the ALA Joblist and the Emerging Leaders program at ALA among many other things. We met on Monday afternoon and heard Lorelle speak about the programs in her office. I was particularly pleased to be attending as a state representative during the discussion of the emerging leaders program. This is an ALA program which trains young librarians to be leaders in the library field. Thus far the two groups of graduates in the program have been absorbed into the ALA organization. It is my intention to urge the HRDR office to send some of the ALA emerging leaders back  to work at the state level. Lorelle was happy to have me on board as a representative of the chapters and said that they want people in the program to become leaders at the state level as well. I look forward to continuing the work on this committee for the next two years. If you are interested in the program you may get more information from me anytime.

Nancy Wilson

802-453-2366

readmorenow@comcast.net

I am writing on the train home from Philadelphia and am happy to share news of the ALA conference with you all. Before conference began we were told of a resolution to open nearly all ALA listserves for read only access to all members. The general principles of open access were strongly supported but the resolution was referred back to committee for more study during our first council meeting. The entire issue of electronic access and online meetings was hot at this year’s conference. There is a task force on electronic communications which continues to study the issue. At our first day of council meetings we were introduced to a resolution requesting that computer access at the conference be handicapped accessible. The resolution passed easily at our final council meeting today. During our second day at council we were introduced to a change in the ALA code of ethics. The changes were in language dealing with fair use and balancing the rights of users and producers of materials. We also voted to accept some changes to Standards for Accreditation of Master’s Programs in Library Science and Information Studies.

I’ll post once more about this conference in the next day or so and, as always, please let me know if there are any issues you would like to discuss.

Your voice at the American Library Association,

Nancy Wilson