In the Winter 2016 issue of the CALL Bulletin, Tom Gaylord provided us with information on AALL and ALA advocacy tools. If you are looking for a way to put those advocacy tools to use, Emily Feltren, the Director of AALL’s Government Relations Office (GRO), gave an online advocacy training session on March 9 which highlighted some of the GRO’s legislative priorities for the remainder of the 114th Congress. While election year politics and the limited time remaining in the current Congress make passing any legislation a tricky matter, Emily focused on the following pending bills which the GRO has identified as particularly worthy of our legislative advocacy efforts.
There may have been a time, a long time ago, when all librarians had to worry about was “technical competency.” If they had good skills, knew their sources, work would come their way because, well, they were the librarian, the keeper of knowledge and the passkey to the sources of wisdom. Continue reading 2015 AALL Business Skills Clinic Attendee Report→
Do you like to greet visitors and make them feel welcome? Do you like to guide others to local restaurants? Do you like to staff the hospitality booth? Or do you prefer to help out behind the scenes with fellow librarians?
One of the charges of CALL’s Government Relations Committee includes monitoring other associations and their advocacy work and, from time to time, informing CALL’s membership of those activities. In this column, rather than focus on a specific issue, let’s take some time to look at some of the advocacy resources provided by some of these associations, specifically AALL and ALA.
Being a novice at something can create at least some degree of apprehension. Someone who, for example, has never piloted a plane would probably be pretty nervous about his or her first takeoff. And it goes without saying that a singer’s first concert ever likely creates at least one or two beads of sweat. In my case, apprehension hit me while preparing to attend my first American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting and Conference.
As someone new to Chicago and new to law librarianship, I was somewhat surprised to find myself, a mere two months into my new job as a reference librarian, jetting back to my home state of Pennsylvania to participate in the 2015 AALL conference.
It would be my very first conference, and I had no idea what to expect—of the programs and workshops or of my fellow librarians. In library school, we had felt the effects of an ongoing tension between researchers and practitioners. We had all been frustrated by endless discussions of the true meaning of information and were tired of climbing the data-knowledge-wisdom pyramid. A classmate had gone to a conference in Vancouver and returned bearing tales of irate practitioners berating researchers over the irresponsibility of small sample sizes. I wondered if those debates were what awaited me in Philadelphia.
As a freelance reporter for the CALL Bulletin, I wanted to track down the most interesting and informative programs at the 2015 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. There were many excellent programs to choose from, and it should come as no surprise to the membership that CALL was well represented in the annual meeting programming.
One program in particular was a standout. Sally Holterhoff (Valparaiso University) co-coordinated the program, Using Succession Planning and Knowledge Transfer to Connect the Generations. Speakers, Deborah Rusin (Katten Muchin Rosenman, LLP), Katrina Miller (Florida State University), Steven Barkan (University of Wisconsin), and Ann Marie Dimino (Blank Rome, LLP) described their experiences in identifying challenges and opportunities as their library prepared for retirements, and loss of positions through attrition. Continue reading Using Succession Planning and Knowledge Transfer to Connect the Generations→
As a recipient of CALL’s grant to the annual conference, I attended the 2015 AALL Annual Meeting & Conference in Philadelphia. Although I am not a complete conference novice, having previously attended Special Libraries Association (SLA) conferences in 2012 and 2013, this was my first time at AALL.
The CALL Bulletin Committee would like to congratulate Keith Ann Stiverson on her role as AALL President. [For more details, see the August 17, 2015 AALL press release and the August 14, 2015 Chicago Daily Law Bulletin at 3] Keith Ann has chosen the theme of “Make It New: Create the Future” for the 2016 Annual Meeting in Chicago. I know we are all looking forward to this conference!
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