Executive Board & Advisory Council Meeting
February 4, 2003
Dolby Laboratories, Inc.
999 Brannan Street
San Francisco, CA 94103-4938

Present: Bonnie Willdorf, Maggie O’Brien, Beth Graham, Nancy Adams, Gretchen Peterson, Nick Robinson, Terry Richards, Rita Evans, Lauri Flynn, Barbara Janis, Tamara Horacek

Executive Board Meeting

The meeting was called to order at 5:40pm

1. The meeting notes from December 10 were approved as submitted.
2. The next Executive Board meeting will be Monday, May 5.

The Executive Board Adjourned at 5:48

The Advisory Council meeting was called to order at 5:49pm

1. Treasurer's Report - Nancy Adams reported that lots has happened since the last time we met. Our allotment of approximately $6000 should be coming soon but we may need some money from the pooled fund in the interim. The January meeting had a large shortfall, and we need to share the shortfall with BayNet. We need to subtract the sponsorships but it still comes to about a $1300 shortfall. We may need to look at how the money was spent and possibly charge a little more for meetings in the future. Nancy will talk to Wess Murdough (Hospitality) and Richard Geiger (BayNet). Maggie suggested that we have a profit & loss template for the program so that we can see what works and what doesn’t. Maggie volunteered to coordinate that effort and will follow up with Hospitality and Program to devise a system. Tamara remarked that the credit card input hasn’t come in yet, so that the $1300 shortfall will be less. Nancy will coordinate will Bill Van Niekerken to get credit card information earlier than at the end of the month. Tax and tip need to be included in estimates as well.
2. Finance Report – Tamara said that we’ll skip this for today as the finance committee met a few weeks ago (1/15). Things don’t look great, but as we looked item by item we thought it would come out ok, but if not, we will have a fundraiser (maybe a movie night) in the summer.
3. Announcements – There were no announcements
4. Winter Conference Highlights – Beth Graham & Tamara Horacek went to New Orleans. A good time was had by all. Many things are coming up. The Branding Task Force has come up with a plan. During the Wednesday business meeting during the annual conference in New York, the attending members will take a vote and 2/3 is needed to pass. There will be choices. The first is not to change the name. The second is to change the name to SLA, and the third is to change the name to Information Professionals International. There is a complicated procedure for the vote. First there will be a vote on preference between the two names (SLA and Information Professionals International). A majority vote carries and then there will be a vote whether to change the name to the previous winner that requires 2/3 vote of present participating members. Many announcements will be forthcoming. Beth presented some documents that are on the SLA Web site under Leadership in the left frame; these have been prepared by Steve Abrams. Rita said that there has been a lot of discussion on the Transportation Librarians ListServ. Tamara will post information for the chapter members to the reflector and the discussion list. We also have to change our by-laws to reflect the changes at National. This will happen next year. National is going to put together a task force on a Code of Ethics. Bill Fisher will be putting this together. Membership is still in decline – we’re holding steady locally at about 500.
5. Nominations for Chapter Professional Achievement Award - Maggie O’Brien reported that at the end of this week an announcement will go out on the reflector for nominations. The nominee can be currently employed or retired. There will also be announcements on the discussion list as well as in the next BayLine. Submissions have to be in writing. You can nominate yourself. Nick has put together an awards page on our Web site with links to the actual pages that were created for the specific person.
6. Call for Volunteers - Beth Graham is putting together the Advisory Council for next year. There will be an announcement in BayLine. Please give names to Beth.

Old Business

1. Twinning Project -- Bonnie Willdorf has sent out five invitations to no avail. She will keep trying. This is a program whereby international librarians who have been selected by National are invited and to become chapter members and sponsored financially by local chapters. She was warned that this might be a difficult process as many people in developing countries don’t regularly have access to computers.
2. Program Update  – Lauri Flynn reported that the next program will be on March 26 when a DJ from KFOG, Rosalie Howard, will be the presenter at a Thai restaurant four blocks from 12^th St. Station in Oakland. The program will be an interview format. Neighborhood Dinner Meetings are coming up on April 10. May 16 is the joint meeting with the San Andreas Chapter at the California Culinary Academy with Phil Bronstein. He may bring an unannounced guest! Comments have been received from the first two programs and there have been some good suggestions. Next March we will have Bill Fisher and Cindy Hill on our program. Lauri said that KFOG asked if they could announce the program on the air. No objections were made. Tamara asked that if there is an announcement, it be after ours. Maggie suggested that we find out about any announcements so that we can publicize it. Lauri also said that there might be a need for mailing for the Neighborhood Meetings.
3. Nominating Report – Angie Brunton couldn’t make it. Tamara reported that the Nominating Committee has completed their work in record time – Jeffrey Mah was nominated to be Treasurer, Barbara Janis for Program Chair, and Deb Hunt for President-Elect. The Executive Board approved the slate unanimously.
4. Strategic Planning Members Survey -- Rita Evans passed out the draft survey. Asterisks are on questions that were asked three years ago. Results will guide the Strategic Plan that will guide what committees will do over the next three to four years. Rita has passed questions on to relevant committees and wants feedback on the survey from board. Rita really wants to find out why people do or do not attend events/meetings. She is also looking for demographic information and how many people are working outside traditional libraries, and also where people live and work for meeting locations. This will be a Web-based survey. Rita wants us to do a test survey and everyone agreed. This will happen at the end of next week. SurveyMonkey is very cheap and this won’t cost more than $20. Question 38 needs to be broken up. Lauri asked if there were opportunities for comments. Rita answered in the affirmative, that there’s a general catch-all for comments as well. If this software works, it might be a good way to poll members on other issues (like branding). If anyone wants to be on the Strategic Planning Committee please contact Rita. Maggie volunteered. This is Rita’s last year (of three).
5. Web Update & Chapter Bulletin Indexing Project - Nick Robinson is finishing his third (and last) year as Chair of the Web Committee and will be transitioning into the re-design that he has been working on. His goal for the rest of this year is to find a successor. The next stage of the re-design will be to craft a proposal to define our goals and then submit it to a few people to get bids from consultants. Bonnie and Rita volunteered to be on the Special Projects Committee to work on the re-design.
6. Chapter Bulletin Indexing Project – Tamara Horacek reported that Terry Dean has been working on this and it will need to get updated regularly.

New Business

1. Brief Committee Reports & Discussion

1. Consultation -- Barbara Janis has only gotten one rather strange request for information for a homework project.
2. Directory – Gretchen Peterson reported that the directory is moving to online and this committee may become obsolete. Instructions have been written out and will be posted on the Web site. Rita has tested this with students with great success. Tamara will send out a link to the reflector. There is a programming glitch that allows people to access the directory through the National site without logging in and they will be notified.
3. Tours – Terry Dean reported "2 down and one to go." The first was the very successful Presidio Tour. It was a bus tour conducted by the Presidio Historian. Second was Berkeley Public Library. This was also well attended and very interesting. Pamela Miller has written this up. The next tour is February 25 at CBS MarketWatch.com. There was definite interest in online tours expressed in the last survey. This will be a guided tour by Neil Chase, Managing Director, thanks to Jaye Lapachet. We will see how it all gets put together, approximately 1000 items/day. Five hundred Web sites license and use their content. There is also an art exhibit and an opportunity for networking and socializing before. Terry is pleased to be working with Rita on the Tours section of the survey, especially on issues such as the timing of events, traveling outside of the immediate Bay Area, and duplication of tours.
4. Professional Development – Beth Graham announced that there will be another joint program with BayNet on February 28 at the World Affairs Council in the morning The topic is Live Reference.
5. Mailing -- Saundra Lormand reported (via Tamara) that everything is going great and that she is using electronic labels.
6. Discussion List – Jo Falcon will be taking over from Deb Hunt while she’s President-Elect and President.
7. Credit Cards – Bill Van Niekerken reported (via Tamara) that all is going fine, except his computer crashed.

2. Procedural Updates – Every year committee chairs are asked to review the procedures, update and change them. Obviously the Directory Committee will change immensely to something like Directory Consultant for troubleshooting. Everyone was asked to please look at the procedures and get their updates to Maggie by May 1.

3. Committee Annual Reports are due to Tamara April 5^th. These go to the Association. She needs reports from every committee chair. They can be "in progress" reports – one or two paragraphs about what you did, what you learned, and recommendations for the future. Old reports will be available on the Web site. This is a good recruiting tool for new chairs. Terry brought up pricing of tours. She wants to raise prices to $10. Rita said the price hasn’t been raised in 15 years. No announcement needs to be made, and no vote needs to be taken.

4. The date was set for the Advisory Council/Executive Board Turnover Meeting. It will be Thursday, June 26

Document maintained on server: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu. Last update: June 19, 2003
Send comments to sla-sf@sims.berkeley.edu, Chair, SF/SLA Web Committee..