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SLA State of the Association Remarks |
I have to take a moment to congratulate and thank those of you who have worked so hard and put in so many UNPAID hours to make this event a great experience and to help you discover Baltimore. First, Karen Reczek and the rest of the SLA 2006 Program Committee? all the volunteer planners from our chapters and divisions?? our industry partners ? particularly LexisNexis, Factiva, Thomson Scientific and Dialog, and Springer! They and many other partner companies invested a lot of time, personnel, and resources into this event, and they all sure know how to put together great receptions! Let's give them some applause for their support!
Last, but not least, I have to say thank you, thank you, thank you to the SLA Maryland Chapter for their hospitality, energy, and excitement leading up to and during the Annual Conference. They were organized, prepared, helpful, and very excited to have all of you as their guests here in Baltimore this week.
All of these people I mentioned and many more sure have made this a fun conference, but also a productive one. I've seen a lot of interaction among you, and heard conversations about really interesting topics this week. I'm pleased about that, but I hope you feel the same. After all, it's your experiences at SLA that keep you coming back!
I hope you found that SLA 2006 revealed a continuing focus by SLA volunteers and staff to provide high-quality programming, events, and services that and make you proud to be a part of this Association and pleased to have invested your time and money to be here. Excellence is our goal with each SLA event or service because you deserve the best we can give you.
Our total attendance as of today is at 5,844 Specifically, that includes:
2,519 members of SLA here this week, 1,406 non-members And 1,919 industry partner representatives.
We are very pleased and proud that all of you joined us for SLA 2006.
The true value of your investment in the SLA Annual Conference is the impact it can have on YOU. No doubt you'll be exhausted once you get home, but after a few days, the inspiring thoughts and ideas you've experienced here will start to percolate. And the benefits of acting on those ideas are invaluable.
As I walk you through a look at where we've been and where we're headed as an association, let's remember the SLA vision: We are the global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners. To clarify things, consider our mission: We promote our members through learning, networking, and advocacy initiatives. Learning? Networking? Advocacy? everything we do is centered on these strategic areas of focus.
We're striving to be a broader, more inclusive community of information professionals, industry representatives, scholars, and leading thinkers. We are building that community by promoting interaction between and among its components through better learning experiences; the fostering of networking and collaboration; and emphasizing the importance of the community that occurs as a result of such interaction. If you look at the 2005 SLA Performance Highlights, you get a sense of what we accomplished last year. And guess what? We're staying on track in 2006, building on our successes, but with an eye towards renewal and realignment of your Association for the future.
With our vision and mission in mind, let's look at the details on our overall performance to date.
Look back at SLA 2005 in Toronto. Several actions taken by you, the members of this Association, had far-reaching impacts across the past year. First, you approved amendments to the SLA Bylaws that paved the way for us to bring you electronic voting on future SLA business. I can't say enough about the strategic importance of this change in our processes. The sheer speed by which we can now act to vote in Board elections or consider future amendments to the Association's bylaws makes us very nimble. And, as most of you know, we did both in the past year!
The first ?E-VOTE? took place in September and October, and you were asked to consider an amendment to the Bylaws that would pave the way for a dues restructuring. You approved that measure by an overwhelming margin, and the Board of Directors subsequently approved a two-tier dues system that creates some flexibility based on your annual salary. This new system was implemented on January 1 of this year. In order to create opportunities for some savings on membership dues, the Board also approved a special offer for purchases of 3 year's dues, so that you can lock in the current dues rate with a discount of 10 percent.
We also utilized our E-VOTE technology to facilitate the 2006 Board of Directors election, and it was completed without a hitch. The new members of the Board will take office a little later in this meeting.
The other significant change from last year's conference was that you approved alignment of the Association's governance year ? which had previously run from June to June ? to match our fiscal year ? which runs from January to January. While this change does not appear to be challenging, just ask your chapter or division officers how it affected them! Our volunteer leaders have done a great job of changing Board election timelines and officer transition. The current incoming officers will serve for a period of 18 months, in order to make the bridge to future transitions taking place in January of each year.
While all of these changes were taking place, there was plenty of activity on several other fronts in our effort to enhance the value of your membership experience. One of the most significant successes in the past year has been the growth of our international development efforts. Everything we do in this arena is intended to extend your reach around the globe and enhance the value of the profession. Specifically, we deepened our involvement with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions as I was asked to serve on the IFLA Operations Review Task Force. I was also invited to serve on the Online Information Conference Expert Advisory Committee. Then, late last year, I was also selected to represent the U.S. library community at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. This was a great honor, as my peers at other U.S. library associations chose me to go on their behalf. The experience was amazing, as over 150 nations' representatives worked to address the Digital Divide and forge new ground for expanding access to technology and the Internet. You can learn more about my time by watching a recording of my remarks to the Washington, DC Chapter on Click University dot com.
We expanded our membership development efforts internationally by exhibiting at conferences in the Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. By investing in events around the world, we spread the word about the value of the SLA community to information professionals and industry suppliers who have not joined us yet.
Another area of development in the past year has been in the use of technology to make your member experience more fulfilling and rewarding. Many of you will remember that we launched Click University at last year's Annual Conference. We've made great strides in developing Click to provide more educational programming, to partner with leading thinkers in the profession, and to enhance the usability of the online campus. And later today, we will announce an agreement with Knowledge inForm to produce a set of certificate programs on competitive intelligence. You can learn more about them in the SLA Marketplace this afternoon at 4 PM, when we celebrate Click U's First Birthday. And if you need more incentive to be there, cake will be served!
Continuing on the technology front, the last year has given rise to the SLA presence in the ?blogosphere.? When we launched our first conference blog in Toronto, we embarked on a new path to driving dialogue and information sharing in the profession. To date, we've created 15 blogs, and most are being used by chapters and divisions. And today, I am pleased to announce that I am launching my own blog. It's called Info-X: At the Crossroads of People and Information. My goal with this blog is to advance the discussion about the value of information professionals where all of our stakeholder communities ? employers, the information industry, governments, other associations, to name a few ? converge and affect this profession. You'll soon see and hear postings from me during my experiences as your CEO that will hopefully alter the scope of the conversation about your value proposition. You can visit Info-X at www.sla.org/infox.
Our movement towards upgrades and enhancements in technology services ? for all SLA members, but also for volunteer leaders to help manage chapters and divisions ? is something we very carefully begun to explore. Over the past year, several endeavors have yielded progress in this exploration. First, your staff has been working through the process of acquiring a new management system that will provide greater flexibility and increased functionality for members to manage their accounts with SLA. More important is that this process will also deliver significant services for volunteer leaders, so our management system supports their work ? which directly touches every member on a daily basis.
The second part of our technology exploration comes from you, the members of SLA. A group of tech-savvy members were charged by the Board in 2005 to conduct an assessment of technology services delivered by SLA Headquarters to members and SLA units. They have completed their work and will be reporting to the Association's chapter and division cabinets this evening. Their assessment covered everything from software used by unit volunteers to blogging and online community applications. Rest assured that we at SLA Headquarters will do everything we can to meet your needs for the future.
One service from SLA that has grown through member input over the past few years is our Web site. Over two and half years ago, we launched a completely re-designed site that reflected your needs and expectations. And just a few days ago, we launched a ?facelift? of the site ? using an extended color palette that we will use in all marketing communications to drive a consistent message to our stakeholders. The upgrade also includes some cool new functionality to make your visit to SLA.org more interesting and convenient, including direct RSS feeds into the home page and a special QuickLinks section that allows you to preset a range of pages to which you can link instantly. It's just one more step in the evolution of our global presence that helps to reflect the modern nature of this profession.
Over the past year, I've been charged by your Board of Directors with exploring partnership development with companies and associations so that SLA can deliver benefits and relationships to you that will make you successful. Today, we have officially announced a new strategic alliance with Information Today, Incorporated. Our agreement calls for SLA and ITI to collaborate on learning, content, and community development through events, publications, and information sharing that will serve the global community of information professionals. Back in April, before this agreement was formalized, we launched our first attempt in this environment when SLA served as the Learning Partner for the ?Buying and Selling eContent? executive conference. Information Today offered a substantial discount on registration fees for SLA members, and it produced a great result in the turnout of info pros to that event. And in October, we'll serve as the Learning Partner for the Internet Librarian Conference in California. Our Board of Directors will also meet there, so there's plenty of great reasons for you to join us in Monterrey for that event.
Finally, the past year has seen significant movement at SLA Headquarters in our efforts to grow the membership while working hard to keep members after you've joined. It's understood in the association business that it's far more costly to recruit new members than it is to keep the members you already have. So we are executing strategies to do both in order to ensure that you are a part of the most diverse, globally oriented but locally connected association this profession has to offer.
What does the future hold for SLA? We've seen glimpses over the past few days here in Baltimore, as your Board of Directors has been wrapping up what is most accurately described as a year-long visioning process. You may be aware that seven task forces comprised of SLA members and staff have been working hard since last June to explore the future in some very key areas:
Alliances and Partnerships
The Shape of Local Interaction in SLA (Chapter Modeling)
Executive Growth in the Profession
The Evolution of the Profession and its Ongoing Educational Needs
The Research Needs of the Profession
Recognition for the SLA Community
And Defining the Value Proposition for the Profession.
Each of these task forces submitting findings and recommendations for consideration by SLA as part of a strategic realignment of your Association in order to revolutionize our shape, our scope, our purpose, and our plans for delivering new value to you ? the SLA member.
Why should we think small? I keep borrowing a phrase that my friend Bill Clinton said once, ?Big things are expected of us, and nothing big ever came from being small.? To strive for great things, we must be motivated, energized, mobilized for the future.
If you closed your eyes right now and imagined what SLA would look like in the future, it would probably look something like this:
We would offer intense local interaction and experience. After all, isn't our chapter involvement where we yield the most connectedness, where we learn the most, and where the majority of our SLA friends are?
We would also be incredibly globalized, with clusters of members in just about every nation around the world who are practitioners, industry representatives, academics, and leading thinkers in our universe.
We would be the center of learning for the global community of information professionals and new members would inherently understand that, in order to advance professionally, participation in SLA professional development activities is a MUST. But more than that, we would offer learning services for new entrants to the profession, mid-career professionals, and those seeking to join the executive ranks, so that you would never have to wonder where you were going to get the kind of training you need to take the next step in your career.
We would offer advanced but easy to use technologies that allow you to connect, communicate, and collaborate, with members down the street or around the globe. And it would be an everyday occurrence to utilize these technologies in order to catch up with numerous colleagues around the world who keep us moving forward in our careers.
We would also serve as a technology laboratory, where you could experiment with tools and services that you need to understand in order to be at the vanguard of the profession.
We would identify and recognize the rising stars in the profession, reward excellence within our community, and showcase the best the information industry has to offer us, because they are such an important part of our universe.
We would serve as thought leaders on the evolution of library and information science education around the world, and help universities discover the unlimited possibilities for growing your profession beyond long-established but outdated boundaries.
We would serve as a powerful advocate for information professionals worldwide, representing your interests with governments, educating executives and hiring professionals on the strategic importance of your role in your organizations.
We would reduce the burden on volunteer leaders in managing SLA units, because such work should focus on member needs, not administrative and technical requirements.
And service as a volunteer leader, whether at the smallest SLA chapter or on the Association's Board of Directors, would allow you to grow in areas that truly benefit your career.
Finally, we would be organized, structured, and branded in such a way that our stakeholder communities ? governments, academia, the information industry, business leaders and more ? would be speaking publicly about the compelling need for information professionals in organizations, and how SLA delivers on the promise for thousands of them around the world.
Imagine all of this as you sit in your chair right now, and then commit yourself to seeing it become a reality. Starting now, we are embarking on the path to renewal of our Association's purpose; to reshaping SLA to suit the future of the profession, not just its present; and to building its stature in such a way that you and your colleagues are considered indispensable assets to your organizations as a result of your growth through SLA.
This kind of future isn't so far away. Are you ready for the journey? The train is leaving the station here in Baltimore. Join us as we begin the process for aligning SLA to be the Association representing the people who put knowledge to work around the world.
Thank you for being here this week, and I look forward to sharing more with you as this story unfolds.
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