To: Ruth Wolfish, IEEE Client Services Manager
From: Eric Schwarz, President of NJSLA (New Jersey Chapter of the Special Libraries Association)
October 19, 2009
A big thank you to IEEE for making our Oct. 7 meeting with SLA President-Elect Anne Caputo a success. IEEE let us use its Operations Center for a joint meeting of the Princeton-Trenton and New Jersey Chapters, and also is donating $400, which helped make the event affordable. At the meeting, Anne spoke about "Creating the Future -- SLA at 100: Changing and Realigning." The event was held the night before the SLA Board of Directors approved sending to members a vote to change our organization's name to the Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals. (For more information on the name change, please see http://tinyurl.com/slanamechange.)
SLA Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect Ruth Wolfish started planning in January to make this joint meeting happen with Anne, and at IEEE. She was also instrumental in framing the conversation once it became clear that SLA's Alignment Project and proposed name change would be the topic of the day. Anne and Ruth were eager to talk to Rutgers students at an earlier event in New Brunswick -- about SLA and the information profession in general. At the Rutgers meeting, Ruth asked the students about their own careers and questions, lending additional energy to an exciting talk. At the evening meeting at IEEE, Ruth introduced Anne and the discussion in a friendly and informative fashion, and even gave out IEEE gifts to participants who submitted questions to Anne.
Generating from the Rutgers discussion, Ruth quizzed Dean Jorge Reina Schement about the university's recent rebranding of the "library school" to the School of Communication and Information. She shared her correspondence with Dean Schement to help inform SLA members as we decide on our own rebranding. (See http://tinyurl.com/yfstm8y.)
Ruth and her colleagues at IEEE who coordinated the event (Pat Corcoran, Elisabeth Moscara and Kristen Fitzpatrick) did so with great expertise in planning the meeting, and also knowledge and passion in serving our members' needs, before, during and after the event.
For that, I'm sure I speak for the 50 attendees, and the Boards of the Princeton-Trenton and New Jersey Chapters, in again saying thank you very much!