Panel to discuss Education and Recruitment Connections

Contact: JoAnne Kempf


Office of ALA Governance


(312) 280-3212


jkempf@ala.org

NEWS


For Immediate Release


May 12, 2009

The next installment in the series of ALA President Jim Rettig’s ALA Connections Salons will be an online discussion with Connie Paul, director of the Central Jersey Regional Library Cooperative, and Julie Brewer, coordinator of personnel and staff development at the University of Delaware Library. Paul and Brewer will discuss recruitment and education for librarians. The discussion will take place from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT Friday, May 15.

Paul has been part of the ALA Recruitment Assembly since its inception and she coordinates recruitment and leadership initiatives for the New Jersey Library Network. Brewer is a former chair of the ALA Human Resources Development and Recruitment Advisory Committee and the ALA Recruitment Assembly, and is currently the chair of the ALA Scholarships and Study Grants Committee.

Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL) Coordinator Tom Peters will begin the hour with an interview with Paul and Brewer. Following the interview, participants will be free to ask questions and engage with the panelists and with one another to discuss other ways ALA can make connections.

The salon will take place in OPAL, a user-friendly site offering online rooms where participants can interact via voice-over-IP, text chatting, synchronized browsing and other functions. The link for the salon is
http://tinyurl.com/6ncakq, and a tip sheet for users is available at
http://www.opal-online.org/firsttimetips.htm.

Like its 17th and 18th Century European counterparts, the ALA Connections Salon offers a place for ALA members to gather and discuss professional topics of interest. The final salon in the series will take place from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT on Friday, June 19. The topic for that final salon will be “Future Connections.”

For more information about ALA President Jim Rettig’s initiatives, please visit
http://jimrettig.org/content/initiatives/initiatives.htm .