Wednesday, March 19, 2008

SLA Leadership Summit – An Overview from Louisville

With more than 250 in attendance, more than 80 for the first time, this year’s SLA Leadership Summit was held in Louisville, Kentucky, January 23-25. At each year’s summit, leaders of SLA, its chapters, divisions, sections, caucuses and committees, come together to finalize plans for the annual conference and to begin the planning for the following year’s conference. And for anyone who wishes to become more involved with the association, I strongly recommend attending this meeting. This year’s summit was especially energized by with discussions of the future of the association and the profession, and preparations for the 2009 Centennial celebration and conference in Washington, D.C.

Keynote by Andy Hines

While board and planning meetings took up much of the first day of the meeting, the summit was formally launched with the keynote address, “Anticipating the Future,” by Andy Hines, Futurist for Social Technologies. Hines presented on the topic of foresight, and how an organization, such as SLA, could “do foresight” and actively plan accordingly for its future and rethink “typical responses to change.” He broke down the benefits of foresight into multiple activities and their related benefits, including framing, scanning, forecasting, visioning, planning, and acting. Hines also discussed changes in values throughout the world and their related impact, and he looked at social trends, and the re-structuring of work and everyday life. He also talked briefly about how lifelong, online, continuous learning seems to be a part of our lives, which dovetails into SLA’s mission of supporting such learning for information professionals.

Stephen Abrams, SLA President

SLA President Stephen Abram, presented on “Reality 2.0: Attracting, Retaining and Engaging the Association 2.0 Member” and what SLA was doing to engage its membership and prepare its members for the future. He spoke of the many risks that are present, from economic to technological, and how SLA would hope to realign itself in light of these risks. He emphasized that SLA traditional values would be moved forward in the more interactive world that is here, and that will continue to thrive. He enthusiastically showed how SLA, with its innovation Lab, “technology sandbox,” and other initiatives, could be the premier information association, and expounded that SLA’s leaders needed to communicate to our colleagues the value that the association offers and will continue to offer.

The Realignment of SLA

Representatives from Fleishman-Hillard, the marketing and communications firm, presented on the association’s realignment project, which hopes to position SLA for the future while staying true to its core values. The representatives saw the upcoming association Centennial as an ideal opportunity to establish a shared vision for the future of SLA, so that the association not only continues to survive, but to thrive. It is hoped that the work that Fleishman-Hillard is continuing to undertake will be formally launched during the Centennial year.
A related session, entitled “Remembering the Future: Creating a Shared Vision,” divided the members into tables where we discussed and developed our professional timelines looking forward for three year and tied them to where we saw our organization in three years as well as SLA. This visioning exercise was enjoyable in that it made us focus on the not too distant future while getting feedback from fellow members on our goals and expectations. We sought to explore how our professional environment would potentially change in the near future, and how we might adapt to organizational changes within our environments.

SLA’s Kentucky chapter did wonderful work in hosting this year’s Leadership Summit. While most of the day was spent in meetings and presentations, the chapter hosted an enjoyable reception at the Louisville Slugger baseball bat museum, and worked to make sure that all in attendance enjoyed themselves, in spite of the sub-freezing temperatures outside. If you are interested in developing your leadership potential, which, by the way can only benefit you and your career, I recommend that you attend a future Leadership Meeting.

2008 Summit home

2008 Summit handouts

David Cappoli

Monday, March 17, 2008

Trying something new (to us)

When the Southern California Chapter first met to discuss how to proceed with redesigning the SLA-SCC web site in 2006, a lot of the conversation centered around how, or even if, to use blogging.

We discussed creating the entire site using MovableType and centering everything on the easy-to-use content publishing interface; even going so far as to explore, even if only nominally, whether a wiki would make more sense.

Ultimately, the executive board settled on a simple, traditional web site redesign, maintaining our brochure-like structure. With that decision made, however, we didn't give up on how we might incorporate blogging into the mix. This is the first attempt at seeing how a blog -- using the ever-so-friendly Google Blogger interface -- might work for us.

Each month, SLA-SCC will feature new content from the world of special libraries. We may also have a monthly sponsor for our posts -- please be patient with us as we work on incorporating these sponsor logos into the posts. Their generosity (the sponsors, that is) will help make our ongoing events successful, and featuring their lovely logos next to our posts is a new way that we hope to say Thanks.

Enough about how the blog works -- I'm familiar with blogs -- what's in it for me?

We're glad you asked. In the past, our PDF newsletters have provided you with calendar information, event recaps and other tid-bits from the SLA-SCC world on a 4 to 6-times per year basis. However, today, information moves much quicker than that. Also, because we have such a talented membership, some of the content we'd love to put into the newsletter simply doesn't make it, or, because of the schedule, seems like "old news" by the time we are able to deliver it to you via e-mail.

Our blog should help us be more timely, encourage more engagement from our extraordinary -- if geographically challenged -- membership, give us a great avenue through which to thank our sponsors, and help us keep you informed in a more comprehensive manner.

Here, we'll write about what's coming up, post brief event recaps, share pictures and link to our online galleries at www.sla-scc.org, and perhaps even get over the hump of that laborious newsletter publication schedule that our various Publication Chairs have so admirably contended with, lo these many years.

Also, thanks to a host of new widgets recently launched through this interface we can conduct surveys (see right), provide you up-to-date info on Library news from Google News (also at the right), and because you can post comments, we may even get to hear from all you folks in the Southland more often! (Not to mention potential Flickr photo streams, Picasa Web galleries, YouTube goodness and other hot topics we all care so much about.)

There are lots of blogs on the internet and we know we're woefully late to the party, but that doesn't make our arrival any less momentous... not in our eyes at least. So, click on that Comments (0) link (below) and let us know what you think. Drop us a line even! And, if you are interested in becoming a contributor to this blog, let us know. We have room for a few and would love to ramp up and make our presence felt in the biblioblogosphere.

Cheers!
The SLA-SCC Board