ALIA Far North Coast Regional Group

January-June 2003

Six-monthly report to the ALIA Board of Directors

The group has held two meetings in this time period.
The first meeting was held on 5 March in Lismore. Jennifer Kirton (Department of Agriculture Library) addressed the group about the Online Conference held in Jan 2003, sharing her perspectives as both an attendee and a joint-contributor of a paper for the conference.

The second meeting was held at CHEC Library, Coffs Harbour on 20 June 2003. Gabriele Ogilvie, TAFE Liaison Librarian at CHEC spoke about the background of the joint facility (shared by Southern Cross University and the North Coast Institute of TAFE) and an insight into how it effectively provides services across the three sectors. A tour of the library followed and participants took away lots of ideas as to how to provide a library service that is easy to navigate and easy to access. The handouts and displays were good examples of Library Promotion and User Education. The tour was followed with dinner at Maria's at the Jetty where discussion continued on various aspects of library services.

Our group provides a forum and a focus for members in far north coast area of NSW to interact and forward the objectives of ALIA and the profession.
These two activities fulfilled the professional development purpose of the Group and as always, networking is an essential benefit for group members in a regional area.

Two meetings that had been planned were cancelled due to insufficient RSVPs. This can be a problem when the group is spread over a wide geographical area. In one case it was felt that it was too much to expect the speaker from overseas, who was attending a conference in the region as a keynote speaker, to drive the 200km round trip to speak with only a handful of people, even though he was willing. This highlights one of the difficulties of running a group over a large area.

Unfortunately our President, Heather Fisher, moved out of the region in March, so had to stand down as President.

We have revised our plans and are holding a tour of the new location of the Lismore Public Library, in August/September, and a Christmas get together towards the end of the year.