I'm very proud of all the work that the 2014-2015 YALSA Board has accomplished, and wanted to share with you some of the highlights of our work from Annual last month.
- The board approved the proposed Professional Values document, which outlines nine core values that define professionalism for those who work for and with teens through libraries
- The board discussed Member Recruitment and directed the Standing Board committee on Member Recruitment & Engagement to explore the issue further and bring recommendations back to the board
- The board discussed ways that YALSA might better support members in their Collection Development and content curation efforts and determined a first step would be to compile resources on YALSA’s wiki
- The board passed a policy designed to encourage a broader segment of the membership to participate in Selection Committees . Beginning Feb. 1, 2016 any individual who has served on any YALSA award committee will need to wait two years before they’re eligible to serve on another YALSA award committee
- The board voted to establish an Award & Selection Committees Oversight Committee to help ensure that these committees have the support they need to run smoothly
- The board decided to put a proposal to the membership to vote on tying YALSA Dues to the Consumer Price Index, which will appear on the 2016 ballot
- The board got an update on what is being done to align resources and activities with the Futures Report
- The board approved a petition to establish a Teen Mental Health Interest Group.
To learn more, check out the Board agenda and documents as well as the meeting minutes.
At the conclusion of the board meeting, I turned over the reins to Candice Mack, who will be the awesome 2015 – 2016 YALSA President.
The Board’s next meeting will be at the 2016 ALA Midwinter Meeting, Jan. 8 – 12. We're looking forward to seeing YALSA members in Boston! And remember, YALSA's YA Services Symposium is coming up in Portland, Oregon, November 6 - 8.
Thanks for all that you do to make YALSA an amazing association and I enjoyed working with you all this past year!
Board Activities at ALA Annual
YALSA’s Board has been hard at work since Chicago; working on the strategic planning process, continuing the roll-out of activities related to the Futures report, planning for ALA Annual at San Francisco. And now, the Annual Conference is fast approaching, and I’m looking forward to the Printz Ceremony on Friday night, brunching with Sharon Draper at the Edwards Award Event on Saturday morning, talking with members at Saturday’s Member Happy Hour, and so much more. You can find the details about these events and many more YALSA activities on the YALSA wiki.
The Board agenda is up online, and nearly all of the documents have been posted. Members can check them out in advance and send comments or feedback to me at cinf0master at gmail (dot) com. If you’ll be in San Francisco for the Annual Conference, the first ten minutes of each of our board meetings are open to public comment. If you have a question for a particular board member about a document they’ve written, you can reach out to them here.
At Annual, the board will be discussing the continuing alignment of YALSA resources and activities with the vision for teen services laid out in the Futures Report. These include financial priorities, member recruitment, guidelines and best practices for youth services, and more. In fact, the mega issue the board will be discussing is a key part of these larger issues - LIS education and teen librarian job descriptions. One big question the board will be considering is, “How does YALSA ensure that individuals who are hired for teen services positions have the necessary skills and knowledge, as outlined in the Futures Report, they need to be successful?”
Also on the agenda for Annual
You can stay up to date with all the conversations by following Executive Director Beth Yoke (@yalsa_director), myself (@doseofsnark), and/or other YALSA board members for live tweets of adopted actions and discussion highlights. In addition, there will be follow-up blog posts explaining decisions and board actions once the conference is done.
Thanks for all that you do to make YALSA an awesome association.
It’s time to start schedule planning for Midwinter, marking off the chunks of time in your calendar or conference planner, factoring in coat buttoning, hunting for scarves and gloves, and all those other winter weather factors!
While YALSA’s Board of Directors will be meeting at the ALA Midwinter Meeting Jan. 30 – Feb. 2, we’ll be using some of our sessions a bit differently this year. Instead of three separate sessions to meet to discuss association business, the first board session on Saturday will be a facilitated strategic planning session for board members. This session is part of a months’ long effort to develop a new strategic plan for YALSA. There will also be a strategic planning session for YALSA members at Midwinter from 1:00 – 2:30 on Sunday in room W192b of the convention center. During the spring we’ll also host virtual feedback sessions for members, and we hope to have a new plan finalized by no later than June.
The board will meet on Sunday and Monday at Midwinter to address current governance matters. All board sessions are open, and any registered conference attendee is welcome to sit in.
For the Sunday and Monday meetings, the board will be addressing a wide variety of topics, including: adopting best practices in change management, bringing more diversity to the YALSA leadership, year two of rolling out activities that support the recommendations in the report “The Future of Library Services for and with Teens: a Call to Action,” prioritizing use of YALSA endowments funds for 2015, and more.
Right now, YALSA’s Board members are working hard to finalize the agenda and develop the related documents. Our goal is to post them online in the Governance section of the web site on January 16th.
To learn more about what YALSA and the Board have going on at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting, visit http://tinyurl.com/YALSAmw15.
If you’re not attending the Midwinter Meeting, be sure to follow YALSA on Twitter, as Board members will be Tweeting news and board actions.
Have questions? Feel free to contact me: @doseofsnark or [email protected]. I’m excited about the work that has been done since Annual and Fall exec, and look forward to working with the board and members to keep moving YALSA forward!
Although the YALSA Board of Directors does a lot of work online and on the telephone throughout the year, our face-to-face meetings at ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual are big occasions for us to have some weighty discussions and make some major decisions. The agenda and board documents for Annual are now available online at www.ala.org/yalsa/workingwithyalsa/governance/board/annual2012. All members are welcome to attend any Board meeting.
The YALSA Board meeting at Annual is actually three separate meetings:
- Saturday, from 2:30-5:30, in the Convention Center, Room 211A
- Sunday, from 4-5:30, in the Convention Center, Room 211B
- Monday, from 1:30-3:30, in the Convention Center, Room 212 B
The Board allots 10 minutes at the beginning of each session for visitors or Board members to share information. This is just to keep us all up to date on any information that affects YALSA or our members. In addition, there is always time allotted to hear from our ALA Executive Board rep (Steve Matthews) and our ALA BARC (Budget Analysis and Review Committee) rep (Alex Villagran). In addition, we will receive a report from our Emerging Leaders group. Other than that, we take agenda items in roughly the order they appear on the agenda, but we may move things around in order to finish a topic before the end of a session, or accommodate a member who is making a report to the Board.
The first session usually begins with the adoption of the “consent agenda.” These are items such as reports that do not require discussion or action, or items that the board has already discussed and voted on in ALA Connect. Any item may be pulled from the consent agenda for full discussion and separate vote if a Board member requests it.
The rest of the agenda is divided into action items (which require action), discussion items (which may generate action, but don’t have to), and information items. This meeting’s action items include:
- Approving an Odyssey Award Committee manual
- Establishing a “365 Days of YA” task force to crowdsource a list of 365 tried and true, easy to implement teen services activities and create an online calendar to promote them.
- Establishing a State Association outreach task force, to strengthen ties with like-minded organizations, such as YA sections of state library associations.
- Piloting a virtual selection committee so that members who cannot come to conferences will have an opportunity to serve on a selection or award committee.
- Forming a Youth Engagement Committee that would identify and implement projects in conjunction with teen advisory groups, as a way to get teen involvement in YALSA governance.
- Approving sponsor and partner guidelines
Discussion items include:
- Looking at the latest draft of a new manual for the Nonfiction Award Committee
- Discussing strategies for boosting YALSA’s revenue streams
- Discussing the Board member self-assessment process—what were the results, and what should change in the future
- Discussing how to go forward in evaluating the success of the Strategic Plan
- Looking at a report on the evaluation of the interest groups and discussion groups and deciding where to go from here
- Discussing a report from the Division and Membership Promotion committee about how best to achieve local presence for YALSA
The Monday afternoon meeting will include finishing up any discussion or action items that weren’t completed on Saturday or Sunday, adopting and presenting resolutions in honor of retiring board members, and installing new board members.
The YALSA Board has a lot of items to cover in a relatively short amount of time, so if you do attend a meeting, it may seem like things are moving at a rapid pace. Fortunately, the Board members take their responsibilities seriously, and h
