YALSA’s Board of Directors was hard at work at the 2008 ALA Annual Conference. Here are some of the key decisions the Board made that I thought members would be interested in:
- Strategic Plan: The Board adopted a new strategic plan, with 5 goal areas: membership engagement & retention, research, advocacy, continuing education and marketing. You can read the full plan
- Research: The Board voted to establish an online research journal and directed YALSA’s Research Committee to develop the mission and goals for the journal as well as the refereeing process.
- Mentoring: The Board voted to establish a taskforce to develop guidelines for implementing a pilot round of a mentoring program that includes a reverse mentoring component and best practices from other mentoring projects, to be implementing in the 2010 fiscal year.
- Trainers: The Board voted to establish a taskforce to develop a proposal that envisions a YALSA trainer program, which would enable YALSA to provide training and resources to library workers on the topic of teen services in an effort to work towards YALSA’s overarching goal to “be the driving force behind providing excellent library services to all teens.â€
- YALSA-TV: The Board voted to establish a taskforce to develop a proposal that outlines the necessary technology, ongoing maintenance, management, and suggested funding sources for a web-based YALSA-TV, including how it can be used as a vehicle to promote YALSA’s literary awards and selected lists.
- Selected Lists: The Board voted to move all of the annotated lists out of the For Members Only part of YALSA’s web site in an effort to help raise awareness of these resources among the library community and general public.
- Student Scholarship: The Board accepted the proposal of the Student Scholarship Taskforce and voted to establish the scholarship. The next step will be to find funding for the scholarship and to get approval from the ALA Award Committee.
- YALSA at the 2009 ALA Annual Conference: The Board approved the slate of programs for the 2009 conference in Chicago, July 9-15. The slate will be posted on YALSA’s wiki by August 1st.
The Board discussed many other topics at their meetings and made decisions on other issues. Please check the fall issue of your YALS for a complete list of Board actions.
If you’re interested in serving on any of the new taskforces the Board established, please get in touch with me , as I’m appointing those now. I look forward to serving you this year as these new projects begin to take shape.
Sarah Debraski
YALSA President
