The meeting was held at Wildfire (159 W. Erie Street) on Thursday May 10, 2018.
CALL President Clare Willis opened the meeting by welcoming the membership. There were 76 attendees at the meeting. Clare also summarized everything that CALL accomplished this past year: CALL awarded $5000 in grants, posted 17 positions, advocated for preserving net neutrality, established a professional development task force, hosted several continuing education events, and raised $1100 for local service organizations. She also mentioned that the Strategic Planning Committee was still working on a plan, but that the Board recently approved the committee’s proposed new mission statement: “CALL supports legal information professionals through advocacy, education, and engagement.” Clare also introduced and thanked the meeting sponsor, Wolters Kluwer.
Meeting Speaker
CALL Vice President Joe Mitzenmacher introduced the meeting’s speaker, AALL Vice President Femi Cadmus. She spoke about current AALL initiatives and development. She talked about the vibrancy of the AALL membership. She had the audience guess how many people currently belong to AALL–AALL currently has 4100 members. Academic librarians represent the greatest number of members, but firm/private librarians are in a close second. There are only 100 less firm/private law librarian members. Femi also mentioned that AALL’s Know-It-All newsletter won an award for best new legal information project.
Femi also spoke about the upcoming meeting in Baltimore. This year the exhibit hall will be closing on Tuesday. The idea is to get more people to attend the programing on Tuesday. She also mentioned the materials posted on the website to get your boss to say yes to attending the conference. The upcoming meetings will be hosted in Washington D.C., New Orleans, and Cleveland.
Femi mentioned that AALL is developing a professional development standard or body of standards for leadership skills and professional skills, such as legal research, knowledge management, advocacy, marketing, and outreach. She also mentioned that CALL member Tom Gaylord is now the law journal editor and that the career center announcements have increased and also suggest that librarians are branching out and are using their sophisticated levels of expertise in areas like AI and CI. She mentioned how flexible profession is. She also spoke a bit more about the membership’s demographics: 6% of the membership is over the age of 65, 32% of the membership is between 56-65, and only 5% of the membership is under 30. Femi would like to see more recruiting of younger members with things like internships because attrition is always a concern.
Femi also discussed AALL’s financials. It has a networth of $5.6 million. New membership is up, but meeting attendance is down. At this rate AALL is not keeping up with the pace of inflation. So she would like the association to focus a bit more on generating revenue.
Committee Announcements
Joe reminded everyone that he sent out a survey asking people to sign up to volunteer to be on committees for next year. Ben Brighoff from the Mentorship and Leadership Committee announced an upcoming brown bag, “Tips and Tricks for Making the Most out of a Conference.” It is scheduled for June 6th and more details are forthcoming. Jean Wenger, Strategic Planning chair, announced that a survey about the strategic plan would be coming out soon. The committee is looking for views and ideas from the membership. Jamie Sommer, Community Service co-chair reminded the attendees that today’s meeting is raising money for Liberation Library and that members can also make donations online.
Past President Todd Ito presented this year’s chapter awards. Scott Burgh was awarded the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Law Librarianship and the Chapman and Cutler LLP Research Services team was awarded Outstanding In-house Publication for their departmental newsletter.
Clare thanked the outgoing board members: Lindsey Carpino, Tom Gaylord, and Todd Ito. She also welcomed the incoming Board members: Jessie LaMar, Jesse Bowman, and Julie Swanson. In-coming President Joe Mitzenmacher was presented the gavel.
AALL donated a free registration to the AALL conference in Baltimore. Maureen Rabe from Professionals Library Service won the registration. Lexis Nexis donated the door prizes. Cheryl Krueger from Seyfarth Shaw and Bill Schwesig from University of Chicago won the prizes.