*Back from the Winter meeting in Louisville, and here is the latest update on SLA and KM activities ...*
Photo of David and SLA President Stephen Abram (right)
News from the Leadership Institute: As outlined by Stephen Abram, SLA President (on right in photo), our association will focus on three areas - Learning, Networking, and Advocacy. There was a presentation from the consulting firm on our re-branding initiative in order to better align our skills and interactions with those of related information players. The panel discussed progress on understanding our strengths and identifying best terminologies in order to interact with related populations. For details see the slides from the presentation at the URLs below. There was brief demonstration of the soon-to-released membership software upgrade; we will soon be able to update our own information and generate reports in real time. Stephen spent considerable time re-emphasizing the existing resources that are available as benefits to our members, including over 900 online books, many databases, and SIG areas prepared by our excellent staff. Please take a look at these benefits, as outlined in the presentations below. One other highlight was the Environment and Resource Management Division's initiative, formed at the Denver conference, to make the annual conference more environmentally friendly. SLA would like to see less "stuff" - less paper, fewer trinkets that are fun for a couple of weeks but then get thrown away. ERM would like to see more services (neck massage is quite popular), and more items that have a long term use or are more biodegradable.
Winter Meeting Alignment presentation: the PowerPoint overview of the Strategic Alignment Initiative is now posted on the "Summit Handouts" page at http://www.sla.org/PDFs/2008LS_StrategicAlignmentProjectUpdate.pdf
The summit handouts page at http://www.sla.org/content/resources/leadcenter/LeadershipSummit/08leadsummit/handouts.cfm contains the complete Fleishman Hillard presentation. Also included are the slides from Stephen Abram used during his presentation about "Association 2.0" and practical tips from the presentations on using SLA Blog, Wiki and Survveymonkey tools.
Upcoming Seattle Annual Conference plans (and re-purposing for non-attendees): The Program Planning and Professional Development Committees are making great progress on creating continuing education opportunities for our members. Based upon our recent Strategic Planning priorities, we are creating sessions for all knowledge levels. Please see the <A href="http://wiki.sla.org/display/SLAKM/2008+SLA+Annual+Conference+KM-Sponsored+Programs" >KM Conference Schedule</A> for our joint Division and solely sponsored sessions. In addition, feel free to contact the Professional Development Committee if you have other ideas for appropriate topics.
I will be starting my new position in March, so you will soon hear more from me about new initiatives for students and an exploration of IFLA collaboration. More soon. ds
News from Feb 23, 2008
