President’s Letter, April 2008

SLA Membership Benefits

Are you aware of the benefits that your SLA membership provides? Did you know that SLA not only encourages its members to develop professionally, but that it is giving us the tools to move forward in our careers?

Besides Information Outlook showing up in your mailbox monthly, and having the ability to connect with your colleagues via the SLA membership directory, you may not realize that your SLA member ID brings you many more resources and opportunities to help us grow professionally. SLA President Stephen Abram’s theme for the year is “Innovate in 2008” and his vision is coupled with new initiatives being offered by SLA to its membership. Stephen’s vision includes a virtual space for members to evaluate licensed and free software along with tutorials on these applications. In these ideas which he articulated during his keynote address at our chapter professional development program “Charting the Future of Libraries” held at USC in October 2007, Stephen sees an “SLA Innovation Laboratory” where members can continually develop their technological, management, and leadership skills. Most of the resources in the innovation lab will be launched at the annual conference in Seattle this June, but until then there are many benefits which are waiting for you, including:

• Click University, SLA’s online learning community, offers a number of virtual seminars, live and recorded, which are meant to broaden our skill sets, and, in some cases, even provide us with certificate programs in specific areas such as competitive intelligence. Most of Click U’s programming is fee-based, but you should take advantage of the members’ monthly free course that is listed on the main Click U page. The current offering of “Presentation Skills” will be followed by “Managing a Virtual Office.”
  
  
• SLA’s Online Libraries, available via Click U, are collections of material focused on leadership and management and knowledge management. These “ebraries” can help you to “become a more effective leader to examining best practices from the world's most successful CEOs these databases are applicable throughout an employee's career path.”
  
  
• Factiva News Connections is an alert service that brings you subscription-only news on a variety of subjects, including Web 2.0, copyright, search tools, and vendors and their products. Here is one way of keeping tabs on our quickly changing environment.
  
  
• The SLA Podcast Center delivers selected content from Information Outlook, which you can download and listen to at any time.
  
  
• SLA’s Consultation Service is a free, members-only benefit that can help your organization develop its information requirements.
  
  
• The Information Portals provides a gateway to over 40 different topics, including benchmarking, international library resources, and digital libraries.

Information about the benefits noted in this letter, and the many others that your membership provides, are available from the SLA Members Benefits page.

With one of its core values “innovation and continuous learning,” SLA continues to bring you and I, its members, the tools and resources to help us succeed. Now it’s time that we take advantage of them and look forward to more that will be coming in the future.

Hope to see you in Seattle!

Sincerely,

David Cappoli
dcappoli@ucla.edu

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

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

President’s Letter, February 2008

As this is my first letter as President of SLA Southern California, I must look back at 18 months of being President-elect, overseeing the chapter’s programs, and the many individuals who helped our chapter assemble a diverse and vibrant schedule of events.

First, I must thank Sue Brewsaugh, who oversees the chapter’s elections for this year and who enabled the chapter to partake in a variety of virtual programming via Click University’s replays. From seminars on data mining to taxonomy technologies, Sue shared these replays at no cost to the chapter and provided the opportunity for all of us to enhance our skills and knowledge.

A number of area lunches and tours were held throughout our chapter’s broad geographic region, and my gratitude goes to the following individuals for staging these events, often in the middle of their very busy workdays:

• Debbie Hartzman for the lunch in Agoura
• Patty Turner for the lunch & tour of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Redlands
• Stacey McKeever for the lunch in Century City
• Belinda Beardt for the lunch in Burbank
• Kathleen Smith for the lunch & tour of the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena
• Marcia Schmitz for the lunch & tour of the University of California’s Southern Regional Library Facility in Westwood
• Cameron Trowbridge for the lunch and tours of the Getty Research Library & Getty Conservation Institute Information Center in Brentwood, that we held jointly with SLA San Diego thanks to Linda Counts
• Darrell Shiplett for the lunch and tour of Edwards Air Force Base & Libraries
• Kazue McGregor and Belinda Beardt for the downtown lunch and tour of the Disney Concert Hall Music Library
• Emi Yoshida-Bevacqua for the lunch and tour of Yahoo! Music in Santa Monica
• Ann Shea for the lunch & tour of the California African American Museum in Exposition Park
• Doris Helfer and Belinda Beardt for the lunch & tour of the Oviatt Library at Cal State University, Northridge

During this time period we were also lucky to host key members of SLA’s leadership, including 2006-07 SLA President, Rebecca Vargha (thanks to the efforts of Alan Schroeder), SLA CEO, Janice Lachance, and SLA President in 2008, Stephen Abram.

Chapter programs were led by speakers who gave us a new understanding of topics relevant to many segments of our profession. These programs also had many individuals in the background making sure event logistics were well-handled.
For all of their work, I would like to thank …

• Vicky McCargar, who presented on the topic of digital preservation in “Night of the Living Dead … Data.” Assistance with this program was generously provided by Justin Scott
• Kim Dority for presenting “Building a Resilient LIS Career,” and members of the UCLA Student Chapter who helped organize and stage the event
• Lori Flinn for presenting “Designing Unforgettable Training”
• Ron Rodrigues for presenting the Dialog Quantum 2 Seminar on “Negotiation Skills for Information Professionals”
• Christian Gray, Mike Reid, and Josh Walters for presenting on a panel for “Living Linked – A Social Networking Conference,” and for the program keynote, Janice Lachance. Assistance with this program was generously provided by Sue Brewsaugh, as well as, Wayne Wilson, and his staff, who helped the chapter stage the event at the lovely Amateur Athletic Foundation
• Sara Tompson, Stephen Abram, Amy Wegener, and Claude Zachary for presenting on a panel for “Charting the Future of Libraries,” a professional development program at USC. Stephen also keynoted the evening portion of the program. This program succeeded because of the efforts of the USC library community, especially Sara Tompson and Shahla Bahavar. A special note of thanks goes to the USC Dean of Libraries, Catherine Quinlan, who generously supported the program’s afternoon refreshments

Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues with the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (LACASIS), especially Aura Lippincott, Christina Salazar, Bo-Gay Tong Salvador, and Shahla Bahavar, for their help in organizing our holiday dinners and other joint programming including “Charting the Future of Libraries.”

SLA and the Southern California Chapter will continue to bring you high quality, skills-enhancing programming and more resources to help you develop professionally. And as members, you need to become more involved in making this happen. So contact me any time to see how you can become more involved with SLA Southern California.

Sincerely,

David Cappoli
dcappoli@ucla.edu