President's Letter
By Dee Magnoni, dianna.magnoni@olin.edu

We have passed through one of our wettest springs ever. I am hoping for a dry and sunny summer! Summer is a time when many of us can look at longer range projects, planning, and personal priorities. Summer can also be a time for personal and professional development.

The SLA Boston chapter board will be getting together over the next month for planning of our own. If you have ideas or opportunities that you’d like us to explore, please send me a message! As part of our planning process, we’ll be discussing the Chapter Modeling document that the SLA Chapter Modeling Taskforce put together. Part of the document recommended a series of chapter merges. While we were recognized as a viable chapter, the document recommended that we merge with the Connecticut Valley and Rhode Island chapters. We would only be interested in merges that were mutually agreeable, and are currently in discussions with the Connecticut Valley chapter.

Our board is also interested in looking at how other chapter boards are structured, and discussing whether we are structured in the most ideal way for our membership and association needs. Once again, member input is always welcome in this process!

The Boston chapter was well represented at the SLA annual meeting in Baltimore. Hardly a session passed without my running into another chapter member. The weather, networking, programming, learning, and exhibits were all wonderful! If you weren’t able to attend, go to the conference blog (http://slablogger.typepad.com/sla_2006_conference_blog/) to find links to many sessions and other conference content.

I am still recruiting Momentary Mentors for a chapter mentoring initiative. I have a great starter group on our wiki, but I urge more of you to add your name to the list. Also, there is now a section for mentees to add their names. We will work through a process for matching mentors and mentees. For those who haven’t seen my column on momentary mentors in the past, our chapter is initiating a mentor/coach program that will match members with expertise in a particular area with members who have questions in that same area. The purpose is to provide 20 - 30 minutes of advice in a mentoring/coaching session. In most cases, the session will end with that initial conversation. If both parties agree, additional sessions may be held. The chapter would like to encourage mentoring and coaching while recognizing and honoring the time involved in such a commitment.

The chapter wiki address is: http://silversmith.olin.edu/slawiki/FrontPage. The login is <sla> and the password is <boston>.

Also on the wiki is a 2007 program planning brainstorming area. Are there programs that you’d like to see developed? Please add your ideas to the wiki! If you’d like to volunteer space or to speak, we’d love to hear from you.

Our new Emerging Technologies Interest Group is getting off the ground, and I’m thrilled to announce that Anna Burke is taking the initial lead. Please stay tuned for announcements and events! There is wiki space for ideas for the group – please contribute!

I am a huge advocate of personal and professional development. I encourage each of you to check out Click! University at http://sla.learn.com. We will be exploring what we can do as a chapter with the Click platform. Two vendor partner learning initiatives are Dialog's Quantum2 http://quantum.dialog.com/ and Factiva's Infopro Alliance http://www.factiva.com/infopro/index.asp. Both offer online workshops.

On a fun note, have any of you explored LibraryThing.com? You can catalog your personal library online, then assign tags, write reviews, see who else owns your books, etc. I am currently putting my own books online, and you can see my emerging collection by going to http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=dmagnoni. If enough of us want to set up our collections online, perhaps we can have a LibraryThing section on our wiki.

Have a wonderful summer, learn something new, and send me your ideas!

Dee
Dee Magnoni, SLA Boston Chapter President
Phone: 781-292-2389, E-mail: dianna.magnoni@olin.edu, AOL IM: dmlibrarian

Return to Top of Page