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Council I June 25, 2006

Posted by tkirk in : Community , 1 comment so far

Okay, the first post that I made was actually a membership information session. The real thing is beginning now with introductions and rules. Exciting news! Stephen Matthews, a SLMS from VA, is running for the Committee on Committees. It is a very important committee because it makes appointment to Council Committees which is where most of the work of the association gets done. Here’s another one–Kathy Lehman, a high school librarian also from VA, is also running for the Planning and Budget Assembly-another really important committee because it serves as an advisory board to the Budget Analysis and Review Committee which sets the budget priorities for the association. If you want to know more about the committee structure of ALA, the ALA Handbook is online as a .pdf file. It would probably make some confusing reading but the answers are there if you want to find out! The Handbook is available to members only I’ll let you know the results of the election Wednesday. Sharon Amastae, also an SLMS, will serve on the Teller Committee that counts the votes.

A long discussion is (finally) over about how the general session speakers are chosen. It seems funny to me that as librarians we are supposed to stand for freedom of ideas but some people want to only have people who speak to us that agree with ME not YOU. There is probably not a person in this world or one beyond that someone couldn’t find something with which to disagree. Hmmmm

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Council: introductory info

Posted by tkirk in : ALA2006 , add a comment

Hi, everybody! This is my first time to blog an ALA event so here we go! First of all, some of you may wonder what exactly is the ALA Council. I’ll give you the down and dirty on these blogs. ALA Council is made up of about 180 people across ALA. There are about 50 councilors who represent the ALA Chapters–usually the State Library Association selects this person to serve. There are 11 councilors who represent each of the 11 divisions of ALA. I am your AASL Division Councilor and Sylvia Norton will be coming on on Wednesday as the newly elected Division Councilor. She will be great! There is one councilor for the five largest roundtables and then one more that represents the other smaller roundtables. Confused, yet? I’m not done! The ALA Executive Board (8 people) are also on the Council as well as the Executive Committee of ALA (Pres, Pres-Elect, Past Pres, and Treasurer). I think we are up to about 75 people. The other 100 councilors are elected at-large. They run on the regular ALA ballot and have to have 2000 votes to be elected. AASL really pushed for people to run for council and we were very successful at getting AASL and other youth division candidates elected.

This is important because of what ALA Council does. It sets the policy for the entire association. To read more about it, go to the ALA website at http://www.ala.org/ala/ourassociation/governanceb/council/council.htmuncil

Today we have had the BARC report which is complicated and most of us in the audience trust the BARC committee to know what they are doing. We all sit and listen respectfully and it passes without incident.

There is a little discussion right now about one of the things that President Elect Leslie Burger’s report. She is looking to develop a program called Libraries without Librarians and some people have issue thinking that this is going to replace newly graduated librarians with retirees. It is really just a short term volunteer situation and I think she explained that very well.

One exciting thing that Keith Fiels (executive director of ALA) just announced to the Council is the Beyond Words program from Dollar General, AASL, and NEA. This is a special fund from Dollar General that will provide almost $1 M to schools who have suffered a disaster. This year, the particular group identified are the libraries who were affected by the hurricanes either by having losses or damages to their libraries or have needs because their school received new students who we are displaced by the hurricanes. The cool thing about this is that the first grants are
going to be awarded on Monday at the press release. The other neat thing is that these grants are going to awarded monthly so that if a school suffers a disaster, they can apply and get the money sooner rather than later. If you want more information about this, go to Beyond Words: the Dollar General school library relief fund.

Announcements— we have 11,605 registrants 4,704 for a total of 16,309. This is a about 1500 less than Orlando but it is a great number considering the problems that people might have feared!

You’ve probably read that the city has been so thankful for our being here. We are the first big meeting that has been scheduled in the city since the tragedy and everyone in the association world is looking at us. So far, I’d say it has been a great success. I have had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes more than once when I hear how grateful and thankful the folks in this city are.

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Photos from NOLA

Posted by ayucht in : ALA2006 , add a comment

Check out the pictures tagged ALA2006 that folks are uploading to Flickr for all to see!
Come back often, since this ‘collection’ increases every day.

Mary Chapin Carpenter Reads to Us

Posted by pmoser in : ALA2006 , 2 comments

What a great concert we had last night at the Annual Scholarship Bash sponsored by ProQuest. A wonderful Cajun band played first, followed by Mary Chapin Carpenter who was spectacular – warm, funny, and slightly irreverent. She told us the ALA conference was featured in an article in the Saturday “New York Times” and assumed we all had read it. We shouted “No!” and she assured us, with a wry grin on her face, that we would be able to find it online. About 10 minutes later a fellow librarian walked up to the stage with a copy he had printed out from the internet café downstairs and Mary’s mouth fell open in amazement. She read the whole article to us with plenty of editorial comments – praise for the librarians for holding our conference here in the city and derision for the reporter who described us as “bustling librarians.” We all had a huge collective laugh and much applause for our organization’s decision to keep the conference in New Orleans. The concert ended with a conga line led by a librarian with a lighted pink flamingo dancing to a lively tune played by Mary Chapin Carpenter, her band, and the Cajun band. It was fabulous.

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