President’s Letter
By Pam Osborne

I am embarrassed to admit it, but one of my first thoughts after being elected President was “Oh no! I’m going to have to write a President’s Letter.” But now that the dreaded moment has arrived, I am relieved to find that although the page is blank, my mind is not. I have already chaired two board meetings with wonderful, bright, hard-working people, and we have some exciting things planned for this year.

We’re starting with the annual Kick-off Breakfast on Sept. 29 at David Evans & Associates. Not only will it be a great opportunity to network, it’s also a chance to hear someone identified in 2002 by Library Journal as one of the 50 key people who are influencing librarianship—Stephen Abram. He is doing a videoconference presentation titled “eLearning: Fundamentals & Opportunities for Info Pros.”

Other videoconferences will be purchased through the year and shown on a replay basis. Rather than seeing them live, all chapter members will be able to view them on tape for 30 days after the first download, either as individuals or as groups in any location. This should give us better flexibility in providing value for all our members throughout the state.

Toward the end of October, we are tentatively planning a Saturday trip to Seattle to visit the new Seattle Public Library and hear Debbie Jacobs speak. The day’s schedule should even allow for a bit of early Christmas shopping before catching the train back home.

Networking continues to be one of the best reasons to belong to a local professional organization, so we will continue to provide as many opportunities as we can. We will explore having our Conversazione evenings on a different night of the week and in a different section of town each time, hopefully hosted by one of our members who lives nearby. And come and join us in February at Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt as we munch on chocolate together and hear a program on “Impacting Information Flows in Your Organization.”

A collaboration with PORTALS, whose mandate is now continuing education, will help us to provide more learning opportunities locally. One program will be “Initiatives for Change: Digital Access, Sharing & Intellectual Property.” Another will cover an aspect of copyright.

We are supporting SLA’s thrust to become a stronger global organization by participating in its Twinning Project. We will be covering the cost of SLA membership for two years for Sana Takrouri in Jordan. Read more about Sana and this project elsewhere in this bulletin.

We will end our year by hearing Janice LaChance, Executive Director of the SLA, speak at our May banquet.

It’s an ambitious number of things to do; we are limited not by ideas but by numbers of volunteers. If you have an hour to spare, we can use you. Could you host a Conversazione in your neighborhood for two hours one night? Could you print out a hard copy of our bulletin and snail mail it to a handful of members without e-mail addresses? Helping doesn’t need to take a large block of time. If you have an hour a month to take on a small, regular task or a couple of hours on a one-time basis to make one program happen, we can use you. E-mail me at posborne@mercycorps.org.

And finally, another way to support us is to come to chapter events and give us feedback. Details about upcoming events are posted on the ORLSA Web site and announced on the chapter listserv.

See you at our next event Pam Osborne, Mercy Corps

See you at our next event!

Pam Osborne,
Mercy Corps