Greetings All - A part of each SLA unit President's duties is to submit a year-end report to SLA headquarters on the state of the chapter over the past year. It's not only useful to the Association; it gives the President a chance for a final review of "their" year. One element that is reported is the events held. When I took a look at this impressive array of activities I felt considerable pride that San Andreas Chapter leadership produced such inspiring programs. For those of you who attended one or two events and may not realize how rich our activities were this year, I am memorializing for the chapter this remarkable year by sharing with you all what I sent to HQ.
Here's to a hearty round of thanks and applause to the Program Directors, Patricia Parsons and Jean Bedord. Likewise thanks are due to Sonia Dorfman, our Solo Librarian group leader, and to Lee Pharis for Professional Development. And of course Hospitality, covered by Helen Josephine and Gloria Elia, is the "behind the scenes" force that is so vital to the event process. 2009 was a truly impressive event year for our chapter. "Go team!"
Leslie R. Fisher
2009 President, San Andreas Chapter SLA
Our Solo Librarian group met actively throughout 2009. In January, Jean Bedord addressed the group on the topic of her book, "eBooks Hit Critical Mass: Where Do Libraries Fit with Oprah?”. At the February Solos meeting, Leslie Berlin, the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives, was the guest speaker discussing and sharing her experiences of the archives. Cindy Hill spoke to the group in April on the topic of “influencing up” and communicating with key stakeholders. In July the group met with Carol Chatfield at The Career Development Center, at Stanford University. In September Craig Cruz, Jr. joined the group to discuss the history and current focus of BayNet (Bay Area Library and Information Network). In November the group met again to de-brief on and share experiences of the Internet Librarian conference.
The 2009 Program Directors rolled out an innovative series of career-focused programs styled as the Career Agility Series. This featured as breakfast meetings. These events proved quite popular. The first was held in April and featured Cindy Hill and Christian Gray talking about branding oneself for the marketplace. The second Career Agility event was held in June and featured Linda McKell and Sarah Vogel discussing alternate employment options for the information professional. The third of the series was held in July and featured Amelia Kassel speaking about the independent information professional.
The first standard program of the year was held in January and featured the Chapter President de-briefing on the Leadership Summit. It was a casual dinner meeting with pizza and salad held in a conference room at a public library.
In March we had a formal dinner meeting at a sit-down restaurant. The speaker was author Sarah Milstein addressing the topic she has written about, The Business Case for Twitter. It was a very popular event.
The joint chapters meeting with San Francisco Chapter was held in May in meeting space at SFO. This was also a celebration of the Association’s centennial and we had a panel of chapter luminaries discussing future directions of the profession. The panel included Bill Fisher, Cindy Hill, Richard Geiger, Libby Trudell and Deb Hunt offering up thoughts and inspiration.
Also in May the chapter held a special team building event. Several members travelled to a local winery for a tasting and wine blending party. We enjoyed the wines of Tenuta Vineyard and then were coached on blending. Three teams developed their blends and all had a final round of tasting to vote on a winner. Lots of good food was consumed and a good time was had by all.
In June-July the chapter held a series of informal Neighborhood Dinner meetings, each one coordinated by a chapter volunteer. The Neighborhood Dinners are a long-standing tradition in San Andreas Chapter and are usually spread out over a week or more and are situated in various locations throughout the chapter boundaries. In recent years these have been calendared to share experiences from the annual conference.
In August we had a reception at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with some members touring areas of the museum in advance of the reception. The reception was followed by a panel discussion on the realm of e-books. Panel members were all players in this industry, including representatives from Morgan and Claypool, Knovel and CRC Press. The discussion began with chapter member Helen Josephine, Head Librarian at the Engineering Library of the Terman Engineering Center at Stanford University, talking about implementation of a "bookless" engineering library.
In September we held our annual Professional Development workshop. The topic was copyright and featured Dru Zuretti, Copyright Education Manager at Copyright Clearance Center in an interactive discussion with members. Questions from potential attendees were compiled and sent to the speaker in advance of the meeting. Zuretti covered compiled questions and there was time for additional questions from the audience, as well. This was a half-day event.
Our October program meeting was held at Intel and featured Melissa Cefkin and Alexandra Zafiroglu discussing the corporate trends in hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. Cefkin is a business and design anthropologist in the Service Practices group at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Zafiroglu is a senior researcher with Domestic Designs and Technologies Research at Intel Corporation.
Scheduled to take advantage of the high rate of chapter members attending the Internet Librarian conference, a tour of the Dudley Knox Library at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey was arranged for Sunday October 25. Organized by a chapter member, this tour was hosted by Greta Marlatt, Manager of Outreach and Collection Development at Dudley Knox.
We had a dinner program at SJSU in November with the speaker discussing "Evolution of Controlled Vocabularies." The speaker, Christine Connors, has extensive experience in taxonomy, ontology and metadata design and development. Prior to forming TriviumRLG, an information management consulting firm, Ms. Connors was the global director, semantic technology solutions for Dow Jones. This presentation was videotaped at the request (and expense) of SLIS. A tour of King Library was organized to precede this dinner program. The November dinner program was the first time out for this chapter to use SurveyMonkey as a program registration tool.
Our final event for 2009 was the chapter’s annual business meeting and Holiday party. Though this is typically a celebratory event, at which special awards and leadership acknowledgements are given, we also had Roy Tennant as our guest speaker at this event. He shared his perspectives on the three things libraries of the future must have/do in order to succeed. It was a very interesting presentation enjoyed by members and guests alike.
Our Program Directors also organized two “for fun” screenings of The Hollywood Librarian, one in July and one in November.
