The YALSA Board had a very full agenda yesterday for their first meeting of Midwinter and several important decisions were made, including:
- Approval of the Selected Lists Proposal. The approval of this proposal means that YALSA’s Best Books for Young Adults List is now Best Fiction for Young Adults. Also, the Alex Awards will be expanded. The Committee working on the Alex Award will continue to select 10 Award winners, and will also publish a longer list of titles that the group considers the best adult books of interest to teens published during the past year. All of the top ten titles selected by YALSA’s selection list committees, including Best Fiction for Young Adults, Great Graphic Novels, Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults, Amazing Audiobooks, Fabulous Films, and the Alex Award will be compiled annually into a Best of the Best for Young Adults list published by YALSA. The changes voted on by the Board related to YALSA’s selected lists is in direct response to feedback from members regarding the use and creation of these lists. The Board spent many hours working on creating a proposal that supported the needs of the majority of YALSA’s members. The full proposal is available on the YALSA web site.
The Board also voted on several actions in order to begin implementing the changes to YALSA’s selected lists. Chairs to those committees affected will be contacted by their Board Liaison to go over the details of the new and/or expanded work of the group. The Organization and Bylaws Committee will work on updating the charges of selected list committees where needed. And, the Board also voted that after one year of the revised and expanded lists, they will evaluate the success of the changes and make any necessary adjustments.
The Board also directed the Organization and Bylaws Committee to continue their work related to creating consistency, where possible, in the policies and procedures of YALSA’s selected lists committees. Information on these changes are also available on the YALSA web site.
- Over the past several months, the YALSA Board put many hours of work in on a proposal related to virtual membership on YALSA’s committees. At yesterday’s meeting, Board members approved a proposal so that all process committees (except for the Executive, Organization and Bylaws, Strategic Planning, Preconference, and President’s Program Committees) will transition to 100% virtual status. The committees that are not transitioning in this way are not making the transition because there are specific reasons that either the chair and/or members need to be at Midwinter Meeting and Annual Conference.
While committees will become 100% virtual, if members think it necessary to meet face-to-face at Midwinter or Annual they will be able to arrange for that. The full proposal is available on the YALSA web site and was developed in response to changes in ALA’s virtual committee membership policies and YALSA member needs. With more committees allowing for more virtual members, those YALSA members who can not attend face-to-face events can now participate in the Association in this way.
- In early fall of 2010, the YALSA Board brainstormed ways that the Association could Add a Comment