1 May 1999

In this aliaNEWS broadcast...

GC call for nominations

More ALW 99 news, please!

General Council meeting

Work undervalued?

Name that Association

Executive director search

What's new on ALIAnet?

What's coming soon on ALIAnet?

Yet more feedback requested

General Council call for nominations [Final reminder]
Nominations are called for two institutional members and two personal members of the Association to fill four new positions created on General Council under Principle 1 of the Charter of Renewal. You have until 14 May 1999 to post your nominations. http://archive.alia.org.au/governance/elections/1999/

More Australian Library Week news, please!
Only weeks away now, Australian Library Week 99 should be in the forefront of your minds (it is in ours!). We are still looking for more news and information to spread across our website on any ALW activities, either planned or realised. If you are developing a webpage or two (or more) in relation to ALW99, don't forget to send a note to us so that we can offer a link to your pages - and don't forget to plaster the official ALW images and logos all around the place. Sales of merchandise are going well - but order soon if you wish to avoid shortages! To use the official ALW logo on your site, visit this URL: http://www.alia.org.au/advocacy/alw/web.images/

For general information and news on ALW activities, visit: http://www.alia.org.au/advocacy/alw/

...and don't forget the very special ALW oration, to be delivered by Warren Horton. Date and time: 11:30am, Thursday 13 May, at Parliament House, Canberra.

General Council meeting
The unconfirmed summary minutes of the latest General Council meeting held 9-10 April 1999 are available for general perusal on ALIAnet: http://archive.alia.org.au/gc/online/minutes/1999.04.html

Work undervalued?
Phil Teece from ALIA National Office recently conducted seminars in Newcastle, Rockhampton and Dubbo on important wage-policy developments. In a major judgement, the Industrial Relations Commissions's Justice Glynn has found that the work of librarians is seriously undervalued. Government action is likely soon to develop improved pay scales and career structures for librarians in NSW. ALIA hopes to extend the same principles to other Australian jurisdictions. Members wanting more information should contact ALIA National Office. A more-detailed summary of Justice Glynn's judgement can be found in Workwatch, February 1999: http://incite.alia.org.au/1999/02/

Name that Association
The plebiscite conducted recently on whether to maintain the existing name of the Association or to choose a new name determined that members have a clear preference for maintaining the name. Of the 1465 valid votes cast/receive, 1188 [81%] voted in favour of maintaining the name, whilst 275 [19%] voted in favour of choosing a new name: http://archive.alia.org.au/governance/review/name.html

Executive director search
The search has begun for a new executive director for the Association. If you think that you have what it takes to manage our Association through an unprecedented period of change and to maintain a dynamic organisation well into the future, you may be interested in the selection criteria posted recently on ALIAppointments: http://www.alia.org.au/employment/

What's new on ALIAnet?
The newly-revamped search engine is proving very popular, and assists greatly in navigating the thousands of pages across the website. And many have commented favourably on the ability of our site to deliver pages even though a simple typing error in the URL would normally have given a 'page not found' result. To those who would like to implement it locally, you'll need to be running your web server using Apache first - then load the speling module (yes - that's how they spell it!).

Our input into government inquiries consumes a great deal of time and effort, and planning. For those wishing to track our activities, or for those who wish to find out more about a particular Bill or Act that may have a bearing on the library sector, the newly-developed ALIAnet inquiries page is your best starting point: http://www.alia.org.au/advocacy/inquiries/

At the most-recent General Council meeting, another ALIA National Office slide presentation was delivered to all assembled councillors, presidents, and assorted office-holders. To get the bigger picture, and to discover some interesting insights into how ALIA delivers services to members, consult our latest offering. We've optimised the presentation to allow for faster downloading, and tidied up the previous slideshow too. http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/slideshows/

What's coming soon on ALIAnet?
The ALIAnet web-building team is currently focussing on ensuring that navigation works properly across the entire site. Using purpose-built software (with an ominous title - Big Brother!), in a small sample [~1000 pages] we have discovered that of 80 000 links found in just these pages (!), more than a thousand point to outdated objects (URLs, images, anchors, etc). The process of determining where the links should really be pointing to will take some time to resolve, but the end-result will be to provide a site with seamless and error-free navigation. Keep sending in those error reports though! http://www.alia.org.au/alianet/comment.html

Yet more feedback requested
We have been thrilled by the response to aliaNEWS from subscribers. It is gratifying to know that we are providing a useful and timely information, and in a format that is easy to read. We now have countless supportive and constructive compliments (but are always eager for more!). As always, though, we would like to know your thoughts on what you would like to see in this broadcast, and how you would like to see it.

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

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