July-December 2002 report

Six-monthly report to the ALIA Board of Directors

Committee
The 2001 committee was re-elected at the annual general meeting in late November in Adelaide. Early in the year Diana Harrison resigned as treasurer (she changed jobs) and was replaced by Deirdre Gillespie, RMIT University. Helena Zobec joined the committee as a TAFE representative based in Canberra.

As before we focussed on having representation from most states and most library sectors. Committee members:

Prue Mercer, president - State Library of Victoria, Melbourne - national, state and territory library sector

Kris Johnstone, secretary - Sacre Coeur College, Melbourne - school library sector

Deirdre Gillespie, treasurer - RMIT University Library, Melbourne - university sector

Sharan Harvey - Brisbane City Council - public library sector

Di Booker - Adelaide Institute of TAFE - TAFE sector

Helena Zobec, Canberra Institute of Technology - TAFE sector

All the committee have worked hard to contribute to forum activities.

Meetings have been held by teleconference on 28 February, 11 April, 15 May and 27 June.

Communication
A newsletter was mailed to all members in March.

The website has been updated regularly. At this stage an editor has not been employed and the site is being updated by the secretary.

The forum now has almost 600 members: double that estimated (300). As a result we have started to explore an electronic newsletter option with ALIA national office.

We continue to use aliaINFOLIT: our electronic discussion list to circulate and seek information to members as well.

Continuing professional development
On 5 February a half-day workshop on the CAUL Information Literacy Standards was held before the VALA conference in Melbourne 5 February. Due to the organiser's departure (Diana Harrison) it was not as well-advertised or attended as we had hoped with only 19 participants. As a result it ran at a loss and raised a number of issues for the committee (being so geographically dispersed) in terms of our capacity to hold seminars and workshops in the future. We did receive positive feedback from the group who attended, particularly in terms of their networking.

National Information Literacy Coalition Project
The special interest group (as it then was) held a round table on 28 February 2001 in Melbourne, and subsequently advanced this to form a steering committee (chaired by the forum president) with the National Library of Australia and ALIA National Office of the Information Economy to assess the feasibility of a national coalition for advocacy in information literacy. $10 000.00 was allocated to the forum to support this work along with project assistance from ALIA National Office and this along with the equivalent from each of the other members of the steering committee enabled the employment of consultants form the end of 2001 to March 2002. The project explored the sustainability as well as relevance of a coalition, and a report has been received. An action plan for the report was accepted by the ALIA Board of Directors at its May meeting and as a result there will be the release of the report in conjunction with a meeting of identified stakeholders in November.

Queensland Public Libraries Association Conference
On behalf of the forum Prue Mercer and Sharan Harvey gave a presentation to about 100 attendees at this conference on the Gold Coast on 27 May. Prue Mercer spoke about the leadership role of public libraries in lifelong learning and information literacy, then Sharan ran a brainstorming session on the information literacy activities of the audience.

Budget
The budget summary from the treasurer is attached. Main costs for the forum are its teleconferences, its newsletter (double the cost estimated to mailout due to the increase in membership numbers) and the coalition project whose costs are being managed from ALIA National Office. The workshop in February cost $1475.00 (budget allocated was $1000.00 ) and recovered only $390.00 in income (estimated income was $625.00), leaving a loss overall. The committee is interested in the development of new style conferences by the association to help with running CPD differently in future.

At this stage in terms of the original proposed budget we are trying to offset costs and we are not intending to:

: Employ a newsletter editor

: Travel to the US Information Literacy Forum

: Hold a second CPD workshop

We have also planned to reduce costs for our strategic planning process in October.

Prue Mercer
President, ALIA Information Literacy Forum
23 October 2002

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