GODORT Education Committee
ALA 2007 Annual Meeting
Washington, D.C.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
1:30-3:30 PM
Beacon Hotel Ballroom

Discussion Group

Education Committee devoted the first hour of its business meeting slot to an inaugural discussion group on e-government. Discussion preceded by three speakers, Linda Spiro on university libraries; Suzanne Sears for public libraries; and Kathy Brazee of GPO.

A short summary will be presented at Membership.
Judith will add links about CALEA to the bibliography that will be posted on the web.
Discussion summary will be posted to Education Committee’s website.

Business Meeting

Present: Jennie Burroughs, Hui Hua Chua, Jim Church, Judith Downie, Valery King, Nancy Kolenbrander, Bill Olbrich, Nancy Reinhold, Suzanne Sears, Linda Spiro, Heather Tompkins

Absent: Alita Pierson

Guests: Kathy Brazee, Crenetha Brunson, Kristen Clark, Barbara Miller, Tina Plottel, Mary Webb Prophet, Janet Scheitte, John Shuler, Sara Striner, Annie Young

I. Welcome and Introductions

II.  Approval of Agenda -- approved with one added item (Library School list).

III. Approval of Minutes from Midwinter 2007 meeting -- via email prior to meeting.

IV.  Liaison Reports -- All liaisons will be asked to submit a written summary of their meeting to the Chair for inclusion in the final minutes.

  • A.     FDTF – Hui Hua Chua – A pre-conference on election resources is scheduled at Annual (2008 in Anaheim).
  • B.     SLDTF – no report
  • C.     IDTF – Jim Church – Reported on a letter to the UN about a proposed change to the classification scheme
  • D.     Literacy Assembly – Bill Olbrich – The National Institute for Literacy presented on literary issues (www.nifl.gov). When they commented on the difficulty of disseminating their publications, it was revealed they did not know about GPO.
  • E.      Education Assembly – Linda Spiro – Common themes revolved around online courses and competencies.
  • F.      Forum on Education for Librarianship – was not held.
V. Announcements
  • Hui, Heather, and Alita are recognized for their contributions to the DttP article on holidays.
  • Judith will report a summary of our e-gov discussions to Membership tomorrow.
  • The liaison reports, if submitted to DttP, should be 2 or 3 sentences for publication. The deadline is immediately after Annual.
  • Kristin reported about the Train the Trainer Five State Conference in Colorado. There are ten modules currently developed for depository librarians to train non-depository librarians. Participants have been trained on using Web Junction to carry out the training. Some states are creating Webinars to disseminate the information. Colorado has received an overwhelming response from librarians interested in the training and anticipates over 600 in the fall training series.
  • Barbara Miller is writing an article on using government documents in cooperative learning environments and/or knowledge management and knowledge literacy.
VI. Old Business
    A. Handout Exchange and Clearinghouse – Heather Tompkins, Steven Wood, and Barbara Miller have finished the review and archive of the Handout Exchange and Clearing House. Questions remain: Who will do the maintenance and how often? Will Grace York continue her contribution? Heather recommended that maintenance and continued review stay within Education Committee. Judith asked for recommendations from the work group for how often maintenance needs to be done. Hui suggested that members could use a Wiki to keep the exchange up to date which was met with approval. Heather suggested we still need other ways to advertise what is there and solicit more contributions.
B. Government Information @your library
    i. Talking Points – see handout
    Jennie has developed Talking Points for approaching other ALA groups for partnering in this initiative. We can emphasize that partnering with others extends both groups’ outreach.
    ii.    Future action
    Our next action will be organizing the contacts. That should go back to Steering to include a wider group with more contacts. Kristen asked why there is no PLA liaison since that would be a good way to organize partnership contacts. We need to market to other groups more. Jennie suggested we customize talking points to ALA groups such as ACRL, RUSA, etc. Barbara suggested that we give presentations to ALA groups instead of the recent practice of having them speak at GODORT sessions. Education feels there is a need for a GODORT Outreach Committee. The Membership Committee tried to work on promotional activities for several years, but we don’t know their status right now. We could brainstorm a list of ALA organizations with whom we need to interact. Barbara suggested we pass this on to Long Range Planning to include in the strategic plan. Judith will report these ideas to Steering since the committee feels this project does not belong to Education alone. Barbara also wants oral histories from GODORT members. The new President of ALA (Loriene Roy) is interested in oral histories and there will be a half-day training on oral histories at Mid-Winter.
C. Competencies for Government Information Specialists
    Questions that continue to need answers are: Will these be at our level or at the ALA level? What are our exact goals and objectives? We have potential partners such as MAGERT interested in what we are doing. Valery and Linda put together a sample survey and some basic questions to get discussion started (handout). Bill Olbrich suggested piggybacking these questions with the forthcoming GODORT survey. Judith said that could work if we could get enough real estate to ask all the questions we need. Anyone who is interested in working on competencies should contact Jennie as Valery (who was heading this workgroup) is leaving the committee.

    Bill moved for an extension to cover the last two items.

VII. New Business
    These items were quickly reviewed due to time. Item B will be reported to Chair Aimee Quinn per her request.
    A. Wiki – Jennie established an Education wiki on the GODORT wiki site. Anyone can add to the wiki.
    B. Virtual Membership – Aimee Quinn asked for a general census of GODORT members on virtual membership. The response from Education is YES, but the desire is that virtual members be allowed to vote.
    C. Library and Information Schools – Education Committee has a web page with information about which library schools offer government information courses. Should this be pulled from the past projects, updated and placed on the top Education Committee page? Yes. Judith has some data that can be used to update the file. FAFLRT and ALA Washington Office are both interested in such a resource.
Meeting ended at 3:40 PM.

Respectfully submitted,
Judith A. Downie, Chair

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Annual, Washington, D.C. 2007
GODORT Education Committee Minutes Annual 2007