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About MLA

MLA Leaders

Mary L. Ryan, AHIP, FMLA

 

Updates from the President

To top of page ALA Annual Meeting, Anaheim, CA, June 26–July 1, 2008

Thursday, June 26

Carla Funk and I attended the American Library Association Annual Meeting in Anaheim, CA, in June.

On Thursday evening, June 26, we participated in the Spectrum Professional Options Fair where we discussed health sciences librarianship with the graduating class of Spectrum scholars. The Spectrum Scholars are relatively new librarians who represent minorities and have been through an 18 month leadership training program. An MLA member, Shannon Jones, was one of the Scholars this year.

After the fair, we participated in a meeting of representatives of different associations, such as the Association of Research Libraries and the Special Libraries Association, to share information on our activities from the past year and priorities for the coming year. The other associations are working on many activities similar to ones upon which we are currently working, including reviewing our ethics codes and recruitment/retention efforts.

Friday, June 27

I attended the exhibits, where I talked with staff at the NLM booth, the ALISE booth, and many others. I visited the “Green” Pavilion in the exhibit hall where self-selected vendors who either sell environmentally friendly products or promote environmentally friendly activities were located.

On Friday afternoon, I attended a meeting of the ALA Ethics Committee. The committee has spent the past year reviewing ALA’s ethics code and is planning some ways to promote the code to ALA members. The chair of the committee and I agreed to share information as we both move forward with ethics code activities.

Carla and I participated in the ARL Leadership and Career Development Program Closing Ceremony, where the members of the graduating class exhibited posters representing the projects they worked on during their program.

Saturday, June 28

Carla and I attended the ALA Washington update to hear the latest on recently passed and pending legislation and planned advocacy activities. Then we attended a program on the future of libraries.

I attended a presentation by Greg Martenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, who talked about his foundation which has established over 60 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with special emphasis on the education of girls. He quoted an African proverb which says that if you education a boy, you educate an individual, but if you educate a girl, you educate a community.

I met with Judy Consales, co-chair of the 2009 NPC, to discuss program preparations for the MLA '09 meeting in Honolulu, HI. Judy, Carla and I then attended a session on e-participation in ALA meetings and activities to see if we could get ideas which might be applicable to MLA. It was an interesting and useful session, although ALA is not any further along in this area than MLA. Carla and I had an evening meeting with Brenda Dreier, who works for our meeting planning company, to discuss preparations (other than programming) for the Honolulu meeting. We had a very productive meeting, with a discussion of ways to have a greener meeting, etc.
Sunday, June 29

I visited more exhibits, including the Environmental Protection Agency booth, where Carla and I had a long discussion with EPA employees about green meetings, etc. The EPA has a website with information on having green meetings which we will probably find very useful when planning for our meeting. We discussed our plans to help libraries be more environmentally friendly and we encouraged the EPA representatives to exhibit at our annual meeting next year.

I then attended the opening session of the ALA council/membership meeting. Most of the time was spent disc using procedural matters and a change in the process for bringing resolutions before the council (ALA organizational structure is so different from MLA’s, not a surprise considering ALA has over 60,000 members and we have less than 5,000).

Carla and I attended the ALA Affiliates luncheon where we shared information with other groups affiliated with ALA. Once again, we found many commonalities in our priorities and concerns.

Later in the afternoon, Carla and I attended the ALA Wellness fair, in which MLA member Joanne Marshall played a prominent part.

Carla and I then participated in a meeting of people involved in IFLA planning activities, and much of the discussion centered on the upcoming IFLA meeting in Quebec in August.

I later met with Becky Lyon to discuss emergency preparedness efforts and the addition of materials from the NLM National Training Center to MLA’s CORE site.

Some of the programs offered at the meeting which I did not have time to attend, but which related to our priorities for the coming year included the following:

  • Sustainable Libraries: Shades of Green
  • Greening of the Presses
  • Protecting Planet Earth
  • Earth Wind and Fire @ Your Library: Changing Climate and Changing Lives
  • Ethics in the Age of Web 2.0
  • Transformational Change: The Evolving Role of Library IT Departments
  • Succession Planning: The Future of Your Library Depends on It
  • Care Crisis on Libraries and Librarians (librarians having to care for children and/or parents)
  • The Healthy Librarian: Cultivating Wellness in the Workplace

I came away from this meeting with many ideas of things we can do at our meeting and with a renewed appreciation for MLA and our meetings. ALA is so large that it is hard to get a feeling of camaraderie, and some meetings were several blocks apart, making it difficult to attend several meetings in one morning or afternoon (there were shuttles, but these took time as well).

 

 

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