28 February 1999

In this aliaNEWS broadcast...

Changes to the Royal Charter

Australian Library Week

Membership renewals

Plebiscite for name change

ALIAnet e-lists

What's new on ALIAnet?

What's coming soon on ALIAnet?

Feedback requested

Changes to the Royal Charter
Changes to the Royal Charter, agreed by ALIA General Council on 7 January, were approved by the Governor-General on 5 February 1999 and have been sent forward for gazetting. Further information at http://archive.alia.org.au/governance/review/

Australian Library Week
Libraries: explore and discover! Australian Library Week 1999 events and activities are being developed around the country, in preparation for ALW99 (17-23 May). Order your ALW99 promotional merchandise (we have produced some very nice posters and postcrds this year) and find out what is happening in your area, at: http://www.alia.org.au/advocacy/alw/

ALIA membership renewals
Membership renewals are being received at a tremendous rate. For those members who have not yet received a natty new membership card: they will be sent out over the next few weeks. Find out more about ALIA membership at: http://www.alia.org.au/membership.benefits/

Plebiscite
Fulfilling the conditions of the Charter of Renewal, a plebiscite of members is being held for a change of name of the Association. A ballot paper is included in March issue of inCite. ALIA members please note that if you are not a financial member by 1 April 1999 you are not eligible to vote in the plebiscite.

ALIAnet e-lists
Apart from orchestrating a veritable explosion of subscribers to aliaNEWS (you are automatically subscribed to this list as a member of ALIAnet, unless you indicated otherwise), we've been busy creating a few lists for specific uses. One such list is for Queensland Specials - please fee free to join their e-list [aliaQLDSPEC] by following the instructions found at or around: http://www.alia.org.au/alianet/e-lists/

What's new on ALIAnet?
1999 General Council is swinging into gear. Contact details and biographies of new councillors can be found in the GC pages. http://archive.alia.org.au/gc/

Navigating ALIAnet is becoming easier. We've created a "help" page, which will be greatly expanded over time. Still in a formative stage, the help page is now available at: http://www.alia.org.au/site.map.html

Also, for Macintosh OS8.5 users, ALIA systems and publishing manager Ivan Trundle has developed a Sherlock plug-in, just to search ALIAnet webpages. It works a treat, and frees up your browser whilst Sherlock does its thing. Ivan may consider developing Sherlock plug-ins for other library sites (apologies to everyone else, but Bill Gates has yet to catch up on this one). http://www.alia.org.au/search/

The Australian dictionary of acronyms and abbreviations (4th edition) is being offered at a discounted price for a limited time only: members $15, non-members $20. Get your copy now... http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/adaa/

Divisional committee information is being continuously updated and posted in respective home pages across ALIAnet. Summaries can be found within our What's New pages. http://www.alia.org.au/whats.new/

What's coming soon on ALIAnet?
Still working on the programming required to make Vital link appear in a searchable index on ALIAnet. It is not a simple task to automate the downloading of a selection of our entire membership database onto the web. We want to ensure that we can solve security issues by preventing the reverse-engineering of such a list for other purposes, and to ensure that only limited information is made available. Until then (and indeed even after bringing Vital link online), individual divisional pages will and do offer the latest contact details. More news on Vital link in the March issue of aliaNEWS.

Feedback requested
As mentioned earlier, aliaNEWS is still in its formative stages. We would like to know your thoughts on what you would like to see in this broadcast, and how much you would like to see, and how often.

Send your comments to Ivan Trundle, manager, communications and publishing (please remove the '.nospam' from address).

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