ALIA Board Blog

After each Board meeting, we issue take home messages, the the last meeting, on 13 March, was no exception. There were 11 messages.

1 It is clear that online voting has been a hit with members, so we naturally congratulated ourselves on that. The ultimate proof will be when the poll is declared on 16 April, of course.

2 Sue Hutley and I met with Victorian public librarians and others at the State Library of Victoria on 20th February 2009 to dfiscuss how best we could provide support for bushfire-affected areas. The outcome was the appointment of Jane Grace, currently at Yarra Plenty Regional Library Service, as Acting ALIA Disaster Recovery Support Manager.

3 Planning for the 2009 ALIA Public Libraries Summit has been moving along, but it became clear that the timing was not favourable to the event because too many other things were happening at that time - the budget preparations, the Queensland state election, and more. So the Summit will be held in July 2009, on a date still to be confirmed with
Senator Ursula Stephens. Submissions close at the end of March.

4 We continue to work with public library organisations, and Jan Richards (Vice President) and Sue Hutley recently met withPublic Libraries Australia representatives to further the memorandum of understanding betweenthe two organisations.

5 The Library Technician Course Recognition visits are progressing as the ALIA team winds its way around the country. Our thanks go to Gillian Hallam, Dianne Walton-Sonda and the many local library technician educators who have taken part in the panels. By October we hope to have completed the task of visiting and talking to all library technician courses around Australia.

6 ALIA works closely with ASLA (Australian School Library Association). and the revised ALIA-ASLA Joint Policy Statements were approved. Our thanks to the ALIA-ASLA Policy Advisory Group (which coordinates our joint activities) and and others who contributed to reviewing these key policy documents.

7 The Board continues to focus on the results of the 2008 Member Survey results. We held a full day planning session on 12 March, and the main focus of this was the results of the member survey. We aim to translate these into member-focused programs, and in this course of action we are led by the Membership and Awards Standing Committee, chaired by Board member Katy Watson.

8 The Global Financial Crisis has impacted substantially on ALIA financials. Budgets were again reviewed at the Board meetings on 12-13 March, and will be monitored closely by the Board.

9 The ALIA Board established two new Advisory Committees: the ALIA TAFE Libraries Advisory Committee and ALIA Special Libraries Advisory Committee. The two new committees form part of a strategy to build a structure within ALIA which will provide effective representation to the varied library sectors.

10 In 2009 the National Advisory Congress will be held again in decentralised style. The theme for the NAC consultation with members will focus on Lobbying and Advocacy - an outcome of the member survey, which ranked this third amongst member priorities. We want to find out what you want us to do, and what you mean by lobbying adn advocacy.

11 The Board considered the informal resolution made at theDreaming08 Biennial Conference last September relating to Indigenous heritage issues and decided to consult further with peak bodes suchas the Collections Council, ATSILIRN and NSLA in order to advance indigenous issues in libraries and other cultural institutions. The 2008 conference focus in its presentations on indigenous issues was the largest such focus within ALIUA, and it is important to continue the momentum.

It was a busy meeting for the Board. If you have any ideas to make the next one (May 19-20) even busier, send me your thoughts and ideas.

The ALIA Board last met on 4 December, and will meet again on Sunday 18 January for a planning session, just ahead of Information Online 2009. What did we get up to then, and what’s next?

The main take home messages from the December meeting were

• The member survey has been completed. We were all delighted to be able to take home over 600 pages of results to look at over Christmas.
• The Board discussed the 2009 budget, and a presentation was made by the Association’s investment advisor, from ANZ. Despite the global economic climate, ALIA investments have fared reasonably well.
• Amendments to By-law 4 were agreed, in time to facilitate our first online voting, in 2009.
• The ALIA Public Libraries Summit 2009 was a major topic - plans are going well, and a particularly valuable preparation was the Public Library Associations meeting in November.
• ALIA is developing a publishing action plan, and progress on that was reported; recommendations will be presented at the March Board meeting.

At the planning session soon, the key input will be the member survey, which provides a huge amount of input to the Board on what our members think their association should be doing. There’s always room for more input, of course.

There is growing opposition to the plans of the Government to censor the internet. Almost twelve months ago, following a statement by the Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy, ALIA issued a press release. It was headed ALIA’s Ten questions on censorship for Senator Stephen Conroy. But we still don’t know the answers to ANY of the questions.

Senator Conroy said in a recent interview on Radio National’s The Media Report (30 October) that the government will first determine what kind of filtering or blocking of internet content is feasible, and then decide what will be blocked. He said “. . . a whole range of people have said, ‘Hey, lets expand this’, That’s a debate that we will come to. What we’re trying to establish at the moment, we’re no further than establishing at the moment, whether it’s technically feasible.” So we don’t know what the government plans to censor, and neither yet do they.

In the meantime, a number of organisations have taken up the issue. The No Clean Feed website and blog is organised by Electronic Frontiers Australia, which also covers internet censorship on its own site. Another site is the blog Somebody Think of the Children: discussing censorship and moral panic in Australia, and another very thorough personal site is Irene Graham’s long-established site. Australians Against Internet Censorship, a Facebook group, is planning a nationwide protest on 13 December. There is also a Getup! campaign on this issue, and 89,000 people have signed their petition. Getup! has an interactive widget you can embed on your web page or in your blog. So there is a lot of action.

ALIA is a player in this, and we have an online content site. Let me know what you think ALIA should be doing. This is an issue which is very important to us, because libraries have always taken a strong stand in opposition to censorship.