Report of the ACT Regional NPC Meeting

8 September 2004

Roll

Beth Clary, Jan Gordon, Edith Hackworthy, Roxanne Missingham (facilitator) , Sherrey Quinn, Helen Roberts, Deveni Temu, Georgina Dale (Groups liaison ALIA National Office)

Election of one delegate to attend Canberra NPC

Deveni Temu

Celebrating success

IFLA/ILDS International Conference held in Canberra in Nov 2003 (joint ALIA/NLA event)
ALIA Awards
ACTive ALIA Midwinter Dinner - ALIA and University of Canberra Awards, August 2004
Canberra Institute of Technology School of Business and IT Awards, presented 3 March.
Library Week events
ACT Public Library Trivia Night, raising funds for East Timor to purchase library books and literacy materials
Various other events reported in ProACTive, no 245, July 2004
Beth Clary wins Library Technician of the Year Award (jointly with Lothar Retzlaff of WA)

Enhancing the involvement and engagement of members in ALIA

Strengths of groups

Law Librarians Conference Sep 2004 - event deliberately kept small and affordable, no expensive venues or trade show.
ACT Technicians - active social and networking program
ACTive ALIA - mix of events (Midwinter Dinner, library visits, talks) - to appeal to different interests
APSIG lunch-time talks - sponsorship from One Umbrella and Asia Book Room; 25-30 members attend most meetings
URLs also holds successful lunch-time meetings.

Note: the Australian Government Library and Information Network (AGLIN) is very strong in Canberra, and includes many special libraries. There is always potential for joint initiatives between AGLIN and the local ALIA groups, especially ACTive ALIA.

Effectiveness of groups compared with other Association structures and activities
Grass-roots support and involvement is very important to the Association. Groups often survive and thrive as a result of the work of a few committed individuals. Catering at ALIA group events was discussed, in the context that social activities and networking are very important to the region, and play a role in encouraging involvement. The group believed that the ALIA policy on support (or lack of) for catering should be discussed.

Succession planning and encouraging involvement
CPD activities encourage involvement. It was suggested that the NPC delegates identify some major themes and ideas that can be delivered nationally; perhaps contract-out the development and delivery. Develop a set of national CPD priorities. Suggestions for a national CPD agenda include:

Digital rights
Access to electronic resources; true national site licences
Advocacy
Dealing with generational change
Impact of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) - in 12 to 18 months time.

There is potential for development of a CPD framework on such topics, including content and suggestions for speakers, the framework to be used by local liaison officers and groups. (Note: the move from weighted years to a points system for CPD was considered to be a great improvement.)

ALIA 2005-2006 draft plan

Sharing the vision
Initiatives: work more closely with other peak bodies (eg, CASL, CAUL, ALGA). International relations could be included in this quadrant (it seems to be absent from the plan). ALIA has a role in ensuring the retention of national holdings of older (non-digital) resources important for research in Australia.

Skilling members for the future
Concern was expressed about sustainable education for new professionals and technicians in general, and in particular at the University of Canberra and Canberra, given the concentration of libraries in the ACT and region. Distance learning is not suitable for all individuals, and ALIA needs to ensure that a range of appropriate education and training opportunities is available. Mentoring plays a role in skilling members. Opportunities for a mentoring scheme in the ACT were discussed; also the role and effectiveness of workplace mentoring.

Promoting innovation
Initiatives: No comment

Success measures: No comment

Communicating well
Proceedings of ALIA flagship conferences should published for persistence and accessibility. It is not good enough for papers at these types of conferences to be represented merely by PowerPoint notes. (Alan Bundy's comments on this in the letters pages of inCite were noted.) Some members have experienced difficulties in sending e-mail attachments to ALIA National Office staff (eg, instances of e-mails with attachments not being delivered, with no error message to alert the sender of this). International relations could be included in this quadrant. General observations about aliaNEWS: a valuable service, but:

it could be shorter, more frequent, with links to further information
possibly embed images to increase interest
could be provided as optional formats: plain text e-mailed; html version on website, with link e-mailed; or html-e-mailed (enabling colour, images)
provide a contents list with internal links to items
include summary of significant 'what's new' ALIA website items.

CPD forms as RTF (rich text format) would be useful, so that they can be completed electronically.

Professional practice
What are the critical areas of professional practice where there would be great benefit in increased publication, dissemination of information and opportunities for in-depth discussion and professional development? (We suggest that the meeting nominates its top three priority areas). A new edition of the Ausloan Manual for interlibrary lending is necessary, given changes in technology and practice since it was published over a decade ago. The areas suggested as important for CPD are also relevant here: digital rights, access to electronic resources; generational change; and impact of the FTA.

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?

How can ALIA groups help to ...identify areas of professional practice where resources and published information are lacking? Undertake and/or propose approaches for addressing the gaps?

Group communications with members and non-members of ALIA
How can we encourage groups to make better use of the ALIA website in order to communicate their purpose and activities to members and non-members of ALIA? Ensure that each new member is advised of the existence of local groups.

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? Yes, but with some links to members-only sections to remind non-members of the benefits of membership. ACTive ALIA would like to have the proACTive newsletter outside the password-protected area. Refereed journals such as ALJ should have 'teasers' outside the password area, with the remainder of the content available to members only, via password. PDF format files are a common way of publishing and would be useful for distributing or serving newsletters and publications.

Local ACT issues:

Need to establish whether any members are disadvantaged by the move from print to electronic distribution of the proACTive newsletter
proACTive will include all relevant items when no longer restricted to print page limits
Members will be contacted to see if they wish to receive notification of new issues of proACTive. For this purpose Group office bearers may be given a list of members' postal addresses but not their e-mail addresses. The inconsistency and inconvenience of this was noted.

Questions on notice

None

Questions without notice

None

Any other comments from the meeting?

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