Report of the Alice Springs Regional NPC Meeting

2 September 2004

Roll

John Chisholm, Sonia Sumner, Amy O'Donoghue, Carmel Leonard, Jenny Brisbane

Election of one delegate to attend Canberra NPC

Sonia Sumner

Celebrating success

The ALIA Central Australia group enjoys networking as strength as they have several diverse libraries and due to their isolation value opportunities to get together and develop professionally. The group expects that their participation at the Futures Expo for high-school students would also be a success.

Enhancing the involvement and engagement of members in ALIA

Strengths of groups
The group stated the following as strengths;

Networking and issue sharing
Possible buying power for library resources
Not burdened by meeting/financial obligations

Effectiveness of groups compared with other Association structures and activities
ALIA Central Australia group feels that their setup as a regional group as opposed to a specific topic helps to provide networking opportunities. When at a national conference they can feel excluded by exclusive topic group such as law librarians.

Succession planning and encouraging involvement
Succession planning and encouraging involvement is not a large problem for the group as their isolation means they are motivated to meet and network with each other. A suggestion was made of advertising ALIA membership as a way to network or find a social scene after moving from one town to another.

ALIA 2005-2006 draft plan

Sharing the vision
Initiatives: Information on policy issues would be welcomed as participants currently find value in reports on industrial relations and websites relevant to the profession and listed in inCite. The group would benefit from having more speakers, ALIA Board members, office-bearers etc. stop off at Alice Springs if they are on their way to/from Darwin.

Success measures: No comment

Skilling members for the future
Initiatives: Discussion surrounded changing the focus on developing education or strategies and skills for mentoring to acknowledging that it happens as part of the professional role of a library manager and that ALIA should leverage from the informal mentoring that goes on between managers and their staff by marketing to library managers that they have a natural skill in this area, that it is their professional role to be a mentor, what qualities a good mentor has, how to develop a mentoring relationship with staff and highlight the skills they need to become better at it. Further discussion surrounded the identification of professional development being important but difficult to conduct in Alice Springs due to the isolation from recognised 'gurus'. Comments also surrounded tapping into remote education resources that are already available. Topics for CPD activities that Alice Springs members would find useful include:

Event management (how do you find a co-ordinator, get funding etc.)
Measuring impacts/success for training courses
Event management
Work/life balance
Moving up the value chain - how to influence the decision-makers in your organisation that are not librarians
The invisible library - what makes your environment better for the customer (i.e. signage audits)
How to go about acquiring online resources
Forming a consortia for economies of scale purchasing (how setup, how use a broker, how to find a broker to bargain with suppliers, should the buying power be regional or across groups/sectors?)

Alice Springs has problems in attracting qualified staff. A discussion ensued surrounded using Incite to advertise short and long term 'swaps' and paid positions interstate. Locally the libraries have rotated library technicians between the different libraries to give them a different perspective. ALIA meetings have facilitated such swaps between libraries.

Success measures: The success measures were agreed to but specifically for Alice Springs could also entail:

ALIA providing CPD of the same level with the same speakers at Alice Springs.
Encouraging employers to pay more to staff who are individual members of their professional organisation (as done by a private school in Darwin).

Promoting innovation
Initiatives: A stars program was not a big drawcard for the group as remoteness reduces the opportunity for CPD activities or to be noticed but the group identified that it is good to recognise contributions particularly by volunteers. It was felt that recognition of achievements may be better celebrated by awards such as Library Technician of the Year by state and territory. It was recognised that the ALIA Central Australia group should recognise and nominate local members for such awards who wouldn't usually be noticed and nominated. The group expressed interest in being funded to provide a published history of libraries in Alice Springs with research conducted on consultancy by possibly a local librarian as several ALIA members had been 'around' for many years. This would communicate library achievements to a wider audience, ensure potential research sources were documented and be innovative. The group expressed concern about the current publicity material focusing too much on breaking the stereotype. The promotion to those not stereotyped could exclude possible recruits to Librarianship such as the kids that are in the library of lunchtime. The New Librarians Conference was discussed in relation to who is a new librarian - do you have to be young, what is a new librarian.

Success measures: No comment

Communicating well
Initiatives: This topic generated discussion about value for membership fees. Concern was expressed that as remote members there isn't as much value and possibly that remote members not in capital cities could pay less as they do with private health insurance. Discussion ensued surrounding the need to be active and take up opportunities to get value. The group thought that ALIA publications such as inCite and Australian Library Journal were valuable. One member was an institutional and individual member and received ALJ twice unnecessarily. Some concern was expressed that with the dissipation of the Association to informal groups publications such as directories had decreased or been taken over by the ALIA website.

Success measures: The group welcomes success measures such as increased participation by remote members - possibly by an online conference such as the recent successful one by ASLA.

Professional practice
Alice Springs sees the critical areas of practice being:

Mentoring
Online conferences such as ASLA's recent successful online conference. The success was identified as being due to the number of volunteer hours put in by the executive officer in Brisbane
Measurement of implementing things learnt after training courses had been attended
Reminders to members about the value of statistics and using such statistics as library attendance for use in lobbying and funding bids
ALIA facilitating the benchmarking between libraries with twin/sister cities overseas/locally

How can we ensure that substantial information addressing issues of professional practice arising from ALIA symposiums and the work and priorities of ALIA self-nominated and advisory groups is better captured and disseminated?
Online conference would particularly add value to remote members. See discussion regarding the successful ASLA online conference.

How can ALIA groups help to:

identify areas of professional practice where resources and published information are lacking? Nominate through NPC
undertake and/or propose approaches for addressing the gaps? See discussion regarding ASLA online conference

Group communications with members and non-members of ALIA

The ALIA Central Australia group finds the website difficult to search. Communicating via the website is overkill for such a small local group. The group makes good use of e-mail particularly for notification of meetings. The chat room needs publicising but should remain as members-only so a moderator process can be maintained. With the wide number of options available for groups to communicate with members and non-members should group newsletters be made freely available to non-members of ALIA? The group does not have a newsletter but felt it should be a members-only service.

Questions on notice

1. Ann Ritchie submitted for discussion the topic of a 2008 Alice Springs conference bid. The group spoke at length about the proposal and fully support it. Alice Springs is a great holiday location, has a Convention Centre and hosted an Archivists conference. It was felt that dedicated help, particularly a professional conference organiser, would need to be appointed and be in Alice Springs for six months. The group felt they maybe able to assist with accommodation placement, venues, putting together goody bags and creating badge labels. The weather and a host of other successful sporting activities would lead to a date needing to be fixed soon. Concern was expressed that the conference may run at a loss as it would be more expensive due to all speakers and the majority of participants flying in. Local sponsors could be an option as the area is tourist-orientated.

2. The Alice Springs group has little knowledge of the funding arrangements for groups leading to a discussion on budget.

Any other comments from the meeting?

Participants found NPC documentation provision and process cumbersome and off putting requiring a simpler way to gather information on crucial items through the LLO to NPC. It was felt that the number and length of documents may have contributed to lack of contribution to the NPC process. Question from the meeting was 'Is there a better and accessible way to get the information out to members?' Other than less documentation to read and respond to no other solution was recommended.

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