Minutes from First Part of 5/02 ALISS Officer Meeting

Sunday, May 2, 2004, 12:30-2:00 PM, Roosevelt Commons

Attending: Dave Ballantine

Karen Eslund

Darci Chapman

Meredith Selfon

Mike Holte

Blair Austin

1. Blair will be the ALISS representative at the Student Activities Office information meeting Wednesday 5/05 at 2:30 pm in HUB Room 309.

2. Discussion of adding distance representative and MSIM representative to the constitution (they are not mentioned, as are the evening and alumni representatives), and of the election of committee members mentioned in the constitution to the Admissions, Curriculum, Research and Colloquium, and DISC committees:

· MSIM—Do they want to be part of ALISS or be on their own, like IUGA? They may have some arrangement or plan already. Karen will get information from Bridget Warbington and Mike Crandall for future continuing discussion.

· Dave will get information from Joe Janes, Jen, and SJ on what is involved with amending the constitution, and on the election (or appointment?) of committee members to the Admissions, Curriculum, Research and Colloquium, and DISC committees for future continuing discussion.

· When we get more information, we’ll continue the discussion of these issues.

3. Dave will ask about status of the Best Practices document from former ALISS officers. Darci has a distance version and will send it to the current officers.

4. Dave and Karen have a meeting with Joe Janes scheduled for Tuesday 5/11 to discuss issues brought up at the ALISS open meetings in April.

5. Darci reported that distance students are pretty much heads down working. She’s going to send out a reminder for distance students to register earlier rather than later for fall.

• Discussion of technical-support needs of distance students generated from Karen’s question about students’ tech skills (she’s been getting a lot of tech-support-type questions in her role as GA for L. Bruce.) Are distance students getting the training/skills they need? Is the iSchool doing enough to get distance students comfortable with the tools they have to use? Should we be pointing students to tech info on the iSchool website or think of putting out a doc that addresses specific FAQs? Darci and Karen are going to do some research on what the issues might be, including a possible survey.

6. Meredith reported that if we are interested in doing a student scholarship, endowment, or investments, we can—ALISS can do what it wants with its money. Discussion involved the following issues:

• Criteria for a scholarship—for who, for what, based on what, how would it be awarded?
• Idea: Travel scholarship for any conference the winning student wanted to attend. Maybe as an award? Needs-based?
• Versus spending the money on speakers and/or other events we might host or co-sponsor.

7. Based on the discussion in Item No. 6, we decided to have a summer planning meeting during which we would come up with speaker/event ideas, and estimated costs and time frames, etc.

8. Meredith is going to go ahead and schedule cleaning parties for the iSalon.

9. Mike reported that he met with Dana Bostrom, president of the iSchool Alumni Association, which is in somewhat of a hiatus at the moment. They talked about resurrecting the Project Network mentoring program and about trying to get an iSchool graduate who is working as a school librarian involved (there currently are no school-librarian members of the alumni association). They’ll be looking at improving the form that students fill out requesting mentor matches; in the past there has not been enough or specific enough information to make good matches. Meredith suggested they look at the iSchool’s directed-fieldwork form as a basis. Mike also is looking into putting together a panel discussion of local information professionals who are doing interesting things. There was a suggestion to include people with an MLIS who are working in non-mainstream types of jobs.

10. Karen mentioned that she wants portfolio issues to be an agenda item in the meeting with Joe Janes, including the following:

• Evaluation of the portfolio process.
• The idea of marketing the portfolio as a tool for job searches by graduating students.
• The meaning of “significant,” especially in the context of working information professionals for whom learning experiences in the program may not be that new or significant (versus someone in the program who has no experience at all as an information professional).
• Communicating that Microsoft FrontPage should not be used for portfolios (Homer/Dante are UNIX servers and, thus, cannot “read” much of the FrontPage/Windows code, so portfolios that use the software do not display correctly).

11. Mugs: Karen presented the following arguments in favor of ALISS purchasing mugs for incoming MLIS and DMLIS students at a total cost of $600.00:

• Environmental: re-usable mugs will cut down on paper cup waste.
• Promotional: mugs will promote ALISS and tie together the different cohorts of students under the ALISS umbrella.
• Representation of students: Karen included the mug idea in her candidate statement and has received 6 requests for mugs since then; thus, mugs represent the fulfillment of a campaign promise.

Following is a breakdown of the mug discussion:

• Chris commented that it is not clear that students will take the mugs to school.
• Dave commented while he finds the environmental benefits of mugs attractive, he thinks there are more useful things on which to spend money. Further, Dave argued that mugs represent another form of “free stuff” that students will take but fail to use. Dave suggested the money be spent on a scholarship.
• Karen responded that the Spring Fling will spend $2000 and that plenty of money remains in the ALISS budget.
• Mike commented that ALISS, as an umbrella organization, is the only student group with the resources to take on the purchase of mugs.
• Chris suggested that water bottles in the Nalgene style might be a better idea than mugs.
• Karen responded that the purchase of water bottles rather than mugs would effectively nullify the environmental argument for purchasing mugs because students would still buy coffee in paper cups.
• Darci asked how the mugs would be distributed to incoming DMLIS students.
• It was agreed that the mugs could be distributed on August 12, during incoming DMLIS residency.
• Blair commented that he supported mugs.
• Dave called for a vote on the question of whether or not to purchase mugs. Here are the results of the vote:
• Karen: Yes
• Mike: Yes
• Chris: Yes
• Blair: Yes
• Darci: Yes
• Meredith: Absent (Meredith later voted Yes via email)
• Dave: No

The vote carried, 6-1 in favor of purchasing mugs.

• Dave asked whether ALISS would purchase mugs for all MLIS students or just for incoming students.
• Mike asked how many mugs ALISS would need to buy.
• Karen:
• Incoming only: 140
• Incoming and current students: 340

12. Social Events: Dave commented that he would like ALISS to serve as “community glue” by sponsoring more events that allow students to socialize. He suggested Pub Night events.

• Karen suggested a Winter Coffee House Poetry Reading event.

13. Karen reported that plans for Spring Fling are going well. The committee meets online in a weekly chat format. The delegation system is also going well.

• Dave suggested using a student-submission-based, mp3 format for music.
• Karen reported that there will be a jazz/lounge style band.
• Chris asked if family members are welcome at Spring Fling.
• It was agreed that family members are welcome.

14. 21^st Century Award: Dave is in the process of forming a student committee for this award.

15. Dave suggested that ALISS meet over the summer to plan events for the 2004-2005 year.

§ Karen recommended that ALISS sponsor educational lectures germane to LIS

§ Dave suggested inviting Alex Wade, formerly of the Engineering Library.