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Remarks to the SLA Rio Grande Chapter |
Thank you, Carol, and good evening, everyone! I am honored to be with you as you celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Rio Grande Chapter of SLA. When I first joined this Association in 2003, almost immediately I came to realize that this chapter was special in our community because two of your members - Margie Hlava and Gloria Zamora - were serving on our Board of Directors. It must be something in the water out here, because you've consistently allowed a lot of great leaders to rise through the ranks and become stars in the profession and in SLA. On behalf of the Board of Directors and our great staff at Headquarters, I want to thank all of you for serving as a beacon for learning, networking, and advocacy for the global community of librarians and information professionals for 50 years.
Just to give you a sense of what was going on around the time this chapter was founded, I asked staff to dig up a few things from the history books:
- Interestingly, the 1956 Winter Olympic Games were held in Italy, just as they were this year
- Elvis Presley entered the U.S. music charts for the first time, with -Heartbreak Hotel-
- The first snooze alarm clock is developed by General Electric, though the SLA members in this region clearly were NOT snoozing at all!
- Within our community, several things were happening around that time:
- SLA officially ended its affiliation with ALA
- Individual dues were 7 dollars
- Total membership hovered in the mid-5,000s
- A membership designation for retired members was created
- And The SLA Hall of Fame was created
At a time when the U.S. economy was growing by leaps and bounds, government and industry research flourished, and the information profession was growing with it. So the conditions were perfect for a chapter here in New Mexico, as government, academic, and business activity were creating the need for the skills found in librarians and information professionals.
Fifty years later, this chapter's character can best be summed up by a statement on your Web site: small but mighty. For all the SLA members out there who aspire for their chapter to be great and influential in our community, I need only to refer them to a member of the Rio Grande chapter. Success does not require unlimited funds. It requires unlimited passion. Here's to you and your fellow members on this wonderful occasion.
This event ? actually, your chapter membership experience -- would not have been possible without the efforts of your volunteer leadership. In fact, so much of your SLA experience is originated by member-volunteers that it's important for me to make the case for all of you to be an active part of your Association. It's not always easy, but it is always rewarding, and the relationships you gain from the work last a lifetime. I would like to recognize the members of your Chapter Board of Directors who are here tonight:
- Carol Hoover, president
- Heather O'Daniel, president-elect
- Gloria Zamora, secretary
- Stephanie Wical, treasurer
- Thaddeus Benjar, past president
- Judy Bernstein, archivist
- Donna Berg, awards chair
- Nora Stoecker, bulletin editor
- Heather Gallegos Rex, government relations chair
- Donna Cromer, membership chair
- Alexander Feng, webmaster
Thanks to all of you for your hard work and dedication to SLA and the Rio Grande Chapter. Let's give them all our thanks for their efforts.
I also understand that Mary Frances Campana led the effort to organize this wonderful event, so let's be sure to thank her for working hard so that we could all have a lot of fun tonight!
And while I mentioned Margie earlier as a past member of the SLA Board of Directors, we should all applaud her for her recent selection as a Fellow of SLA. She and the rest of our 23 award winners and honorees will be recognized for their contributions to the profession and to SLA during the Opening General Session of next month's Annual Conference in Baltimore. I hope many of you are making plans to be with us there to celebrate her accomplishments and catch up with colleagues from around the world.
I'd like to take a few minutes to share with you about things that are happening in the SLA community that you've either heard previously or will hear in the coming weeks. Lately, I've begun to notice that executives of industry partners and other associations have begun to change their perceptions about the kind of association I lead. We have begun to develop new partnerships with organizations like the Software and Information Industry Association and Information Today, Incorporated; and I've been able to forge new ground at events like the European Business Information Conference and the Buying and Selling eContent Executive Conference. The result for you is that we are gaining access to new sectors for growth in membership and to leading thinkers in the information industry.
Now, insofar as the SLA member experience is concerned, I see a lot of thoughtful dialogue and generation of great ideas taking place recently ? particularly in the work of the task forces created by SLA President Pam Rollo in 2005. Those task forces involve many of you and your peers in other nations in shaping the future of the Association. It may not seem like that's the case sometimes, but the SLA Board of Directors is committed to acting on the findings of the task forces in a manner that will strategically align SLA for the library and information profession of the future. The task forces are working on such topics as:
- Alliances and partnerships
- Chapter modeling
- Executive growth
- New visions for the profession
- Defining and advancing the value of the profession
- Recognition for the profession
- Research on the future of the practice
These task forces will report to the Board in Baltimore, and their findings will be shared with members and stakeholders. I encourage all of you to pay close attention to the proceedings and share your thoughts with members of the SLA Board in the coming months.
Another venue in which I've seen some productive work is the SLA Technology Advisory Group, which was formed as a result of a lot of thoughtful feedback from SLA members around the world.
This group is working with SLA staff to identify the technological needs of SLA members and volunteer leaders moving forward, so that new services acquired by SLA Headquarters deliver on those needs. There are many ways in which SLA should be a proving ground for new technologies, but there are other ways in which we should strive to implement technology that will meet our members' needs and has been tested in the real world. That means smart deployment ? not simply acquiring the newest gadget. So as we continue this effort, I'd like to hear from you on both fronts: how SLA can be a laboratory for technology experimentation, and how SLA can deliver services and opportunities by utilizing technology in an effective manner.
One of the ways in which we continue to evolve technologically is with Click University, the first and only online learning system created for post-graduate information professionals. We're coming up on the 1st Birthday for Click, and it has grown significantly in one year. It will continue to grow based on your continuing education needs. When Click launched last year, I hailed it as the beginning of something great. With your involvement and commitment to using Click as your resource for learning, it will continue to grow and deliver on your evolving needs.
One success story yielded after the launch of Click is about to come to fruition. Cynthia Cheng Correia, an active member of the Competitive Intelligence Division, is working with staff to develop a certificate program on competitive intelligence for librarians and information professionals. This marks the first coordinated series of programming to be designed by SLA members for SLA members and made available via Click University.
By the way, Click University continues to be available only to members of SLA, and we are committed to keeping it that way into the foreseeable future. So that you can get an idea of what it's like to learn on Click, we've begun posting selected events free of charge. Right now, you can view a speech I gave to the Washington, DC Chapter about my involvement in the World Summit on the Information Society.
In the first four months of 2006, I'm pleased to say that we have taken several strategic actions at SLA Headquarters that are great indicators for the future:
- We've hired four new staff, including an IT director, a PR director, and two staff devoted to member and leader services.
- We completed our third consecutive year with an operating net surplus - and rest assured that those dollars are being invested back into member services!
- We're continuing our exploration of international growth, as a provisional chapter has been created in China and efforts are underway to acquire signatures for a petition for official chapter status.
- We're working on a graphic re-design of the SLA Web site that will offer continued improvements for accessibility to information. We continue to explore our place in the ?blogosphere? as new Web logs are being created regularly, and we will blog our second consecutive SLA Annual Conference.
I'd also like to apprise you of a pilot project that we initiated earlier this year that is now going to become an ongoing campaign for SLA. Last month, we advertised the value of connections in the SLA community through a full-page ad in Information World Review, the leading English language publication for information professionals in Europe. The ad featured Neil Infield, a long-serving member of SLA and the Association's Europe Chapter, who will join Margie as a Fellow of SLA next month.
This was an experiment at first, as our staff has been working to put a face on the profession through articles, award recognition, and identifying the people in our community who are doing great things. The positive reception we've received from members in Europe, from prospective members, and from our Board of Directors has prompted us to expand the project's scope. Beginning this month, the ad will be featured in IWR once again, but this time it will be on the back cover - a strategic location in the magazine. What's more is that we will develop new versions with other interesting members from around the world for use in the same position in IWR over the next several months. We'll also begin using the ads in North American trade publications as well. It's all part of an effort by SLA to focus more on the value of the profession and, by extension, the value of SLA to the profession.
I want to thank you for inviting me here tonight for this event. I look forward to seeing all of you in Baltimore for SLA 2006, and I'll certainly entertain any questions you might have. But most importantly, congratulations on 50 years of success and strength as a force in the SLA community. Thank you!
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