PLA Blog

Ethics, Joanne Pinder reported on the proposed changes in the ALA Code of Ethics.

Clara Bohrer reported on the finances of PLA. Fund balance was about $25,000 lower than expected partly because the Spring Symposium was not as successful as budgeted. The other reason is a printing cost which will be recovered when the published book is finally sold. Clara then reviewed the current year. The reports do not show any revenue for the conference which will occur in March. PLA is set with a cyclical budget for spending more in one year and capturing revenue from conferences in the other years. Registration for the conference is running ahead of Boston.

Budget assumption for the future is that there will be an endowment transfer in the years in which conferences are held. BARC has created a new series of budget review guidelines. One item noted was that the budget to actual variance should be no more than 5%. It is not clear whether that is on the overall budget or for individual line items.

Molly Fogarty reported on the Deliberative Dialog meeting on December 12. She explained the purpose of the meeting was about getting groups within ALA to consensus on a stand. In the particular case it was over GPO standards. The goal was to establish a protocol if units cannot agree.

There was discussion of the Emerging Leaders Program about participants and how the project worked.

Carolyn Anthony reported on the Library Support Staff Certification Program which is an IMLS program jointly with Western Council of State Libraries. They have developed a set of competencies. This expected to be completed in the summer of 2010. The next year is policy and procedure and on assessment (tests, portfolio, experience). It will then be field tested using the CPLA model. It is an exciting idea.

Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts, reported on a survey on reading. Survey of adults showed less than half had read a book of poetry, fiction in the past year. Lots of data. Partly in answer, they created the Big Read to encourage communities to read the same book.

Battery dying. More to come.

Tags: ALA Council, ALA Governance, ALAMidwinter2008, PLA, PLA Board, reading

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.