ALIA Board Blog

Last week it was a delight to attend the Australian School Library Association’s (ASLA) Conference in Perth. ASLA and ALIA are close  partners  and under our joint Memorandum of Understanding the President of each Association is the guest of the other at our respective biennial conferences. During the Conference ASLA President Rob Moore and I signed the updated Terms of Reference for the ALIA/ASLA Policy Advisory Group in front of witnesses, who included members of the PAG (another acronym to add to my ALIA thesaurus). A huge thanks to the ALIA and ASLA representatives on this Group, several of whom I met while I was in Perth. Through their dedication and the  open communication between the Executive Officers of both Associations (Sue Hutley, ALIA and Karen Bonnano, ASLA) we have firm foundations for the future.

Congratulations to the ASLA Conference organising committee for an exciting program on the theme of “Engage, Explore, Celebrate”. If you get the opportunity I would encourage you to attend a session or a conference outside your sectoral interests. It’s a great way of reigniting your thinking and an excellent reminder of how the jigsaw pieces all fit together. From my “real job” perspective it’s been a wake up call to re-engage in a more formal way with the school librarians in our community for the benefit of all.

I also caught up with the West Australian Aurorans and former ALIA President Imogen Garner over dinner while I was in Perth. It was a very lively table with everyone talking at once. Thanks to Jill Benn for arranging it despite her jet lag. As usual I posed the “did Aurora make a difference?” question and the universal answer was yes (I was one young man’s mentor at Aurora so what else could he say!). Applications for the 2010 Aurora Institute close on 16 October 2009 so if you’re thinking of applying get your skates on.

Public holiday here in NSW and the last day of my long (6 week) break from work. I think a day of gardening, dog walking and friends is in store.

Cheers

Jan

Jan Richards, ALIA President

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 6:10 am and is filed under ALIA groups, School librarians, Aurora Foundation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.