SANDALL
Board Meeting Minutes
2/25/09

Held at USD Alumni Building.
[Many thanks to John Adkins for setting up this meeting and for arranging lunch.]

Meeting commenced at 12:01 p.m.

Present: Sheila Corman (Past President), John Adkins (President), Betsy Chessler (VP), Deb Morse (Social Responsibility Chair), Carmen Brigandi (Nominations), Amy Moberly (newsletter), Maggie McDonald (Archives), Tina Jagerson (Govt. Relations), Brent Naritomi (Grants), Carol Hyne (Website & Listserv)

Absent: Arnold Josafat (Employment), Gina Catalano(Secretary), Leigh Inman (Treasurer), Vicki Williamson (PR), Kelly Keach (Library School Liaison), Isabel Eustaquio (Bylaws).

Secretary: Betsy served as secretary in Gina's absence.

This meeting focuses on, and celebrates, the work and dedication of our committee chairs.

John reviewed "authentic leadership" principles based on AALL presentation he attended.

Treasurer's Report

John reviewed report in Leigh's absence. See attached. 115 current members. 15 new members in FY 2008-09. We are in the black.

Old Business

Officer Updates

President: John has been doing focus groups of ten groups of ten (or thereabouts). The most recent focus group was at Cal Western. Everyone loves the newsletter and keeping informed via the newsletter. All members read the newsletter, as not everyone has need of listserv and/or can attend brownbags.

John is working on creating a Wiki for the board to make transitions between officers easier. It is good for continuity to record what worked well and save those great organization ideas. Each officer will have their own page. Password protected and just for board members. Central discussion forum for the board.

VP: Betsy described our last several programs, including a presentation on elder abuse litigation by Deb Morse, our Fall Workshop, and our successful holiday party at the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park.

New Business

Vendor Appreciation Award
Vendors provide money and support for SANDALL and should be recognized. Other chapters have this award. Sheila moved and Betsy seconded we a create vendor appreciation award. Motion passed. Criteria would be individual rep's support for SANDALL. Personal involvement of vendor would take precedence over money donated. A few candidates were mentioned for the award during the meeting. John will ask for nominations via our listserv as well. Once the candidate is selected by the board, theVP (or her delegate) will present the award at either the Spring or Fall Workshop (with the Fall Workshop being the preferred venue). Winner will be presented with a certificate and/or plaque. No monetary prize.

SANDALL as a support network
Our members are being laid off or their staff cut back. How can SANDALL support these members? A start is to have an expanded list of jobs posted on SANDALL listserv to include paraprofessional positions, and greater geographic area (all of US). Will include nontraditional jobs too. Arnold will post jobs more frequently. Already have links for SoCal region. We should check if we need to update that. Job listings link on every SANDALL page.

Support internships. The idea would be that SANDALL would help match interns with jobs. It was suggested that the Employment Liaison form a committee to investigate this. Need more details and plan that can be brought to board. Need guidelines. Need to do survey to see if there is interest in formalizing support for internship. Needs board approval. SCALL has a program, and we can model our program on this. John will approach Arnold about forming a special committee to look into this further and report back to board.

Committee Reports

Govt Relations Committee (Tina) - Now tracking more bills. Working on policy, which is mix of AALL and NOCALL/SCALL policies. Will present to board when done. Tina very active in publicizing new laws that affect law librarians and John thanked her for that. Tina is sole member of committee. Some legislative offices will set up alerts for you. Tina has lots of keywords that she is using now.

Public Relations (Tina reporting on behalf of Vicki Williamson): Looking for volunteers for SANDALL table at AALL conference in July. Have a few members scheduled for table right now, including Melissa Fung, Vicki and Tina, Charles Dean, Carmen Brigandi, and (hopefully) John Adkins. Hope to bring archival information to table. Vicki has SANDALL keychains. Hand out pretzels or other salty or fruity snack. Edible sand dollars were suggested as well.

Tina suggested selling SANDALL logo'd material, such as mugs and t-shirts. Sell at all SANDALL events to raise $ for grants. NOCALL and SCALL sell such stuff to raise funds.

Would be nice to do Survey Monkey on who will attend AALL conference and then share names. Maybe John could send out note to listserv on this in April?

Social Responsibility (Deb) - New committee. Goal is to go out and do good. Great proactive committee. Did book drive over holiday, and gathered 129 books for children. Sheila and Gina Catalano and Benita Ghura and Steve Corman participated in walk at Equestrian Center at Mission Trail for the Heart Transplant Center at Rady's Children's Hospital. Lots of fun. The committee hopes to do a quarterly event. Would like to come up with a yearly major project as well. Perhaps we can do joint project with SLA. Sheila suggested adopting a family over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays to provide food, goods, school supplies, etc. Another suggested activity was to clean up beaches and rivers. Carol did team building exercise of clearing brush at Mission Trails. Okay to focus on community at large. Betsy suggested focus be on library related services. If we work as a team, it would be great to have t-shirts for this purpose.

Archives (Maggie) - Archives are now in boxes while a reorganization of the USD Legal Research Center archives is in progress. USD is creating a new Rare Books room where the archives can be housed. Maggie will reorganize and file material. John has material as well. Includes first officers photos. We are asking for donations of SANDALL event photos. Amy would prefer digital versions. Suggestion: Use digital photo frame to show off photos at our SANDALL table at the AALL Conference this July.

Newsletter (Amy) - Renewed interest in publication. Great layout. Amy has been putting out newsletter 8 years now! Went digital a year and half ago.

Grants (Brent) - Sent out announcement for SCALL grants. Will send out announcement for Spring workshop shortly. Arnold Josafat, Bob Richards, Tom Champagne and Brent are on committee. In the past the committee has tried to give grants to newer members, but as more members lack conference funds, the grants are now open to anyone, and especially those members who have never applied for a grant before. Still discussing what is covered by grant. Is it just registration, or travel and lodging expenses as well? Will conclude discussion on SCALL grants by next week. Will offer 10 grants for Spring Workshop. There are two grant applicants for SCALL conference so far.

Nominations (Carmen B.) Chris Pickford and Carmen are on this committee. Have one person per slot. Will have names to board by Friday. Carmen said she didn't know much about new members. Would love bios of members to help with nominations process. Membership directory will be expanded in 2009, be sorted by institution, zip, and will also now include job title. That should be some help. We can also step up profiling new members in newsletter. Board can feed Amy names of new members. Could do article in newsletter on benefits of serving on the board as well. John thinks personal approach works best. Tina suggests publicizing job descriptions. Board members could write up their job descriptions in the newsletter so members can understand what each position does and perhaps be more open to running for office themselves. Unique among AALL chapters, the SANDALL VP does not have to move up to President, so it technically only a one year commitment. The biggest hurdle seems to be that people don't know what time commitment is required for each position.

Long Range Planning (Sheila) - Members: Sandra Dawson, Heather Phillips, Judith Lihosit, Brandon Baker, Michelle Schmidt, Sheila Corman. Reports due a week from Friday. Will then vote on top ten ideas and send top ten items to board, and then sent to membership. Sheila tried to pull members from different sectors. John says he wants to address brownbags because attendance seems down. Tina likes the idea of lunchtime Webinars. Many members are far away, and this would be more convenient.

Website and Listserv (Carol) - Carol has been the SANDALL Webmaster for 9 years! She's currently working on password protection for the member directory and plans to have that up by Easter. Otherwise, she tries to keep everything up to date and post announcements quickly. The SANDALL Web pages are hosted by AALL. AALL is moving to new servers and asking all Webmasters to review their sites. Carol has reduced the SANDALL site to 70 files and she tries to link to site directly to job listing instead of repeating information on a new page. She hopes to have stats in the future on which pages are viewed most frequently, as currently statistics are not available from AALL. In particular, she doesn't know if the resource pages are being viewed. She would like to update the resource pages and will be asking for volunteers for this. She redesigned the site in 2004. Maybe it's time to change the look, make it fresher. Carol is looking for help with this and other potential projects. She is the sole committee member and would looks for help for individual projects. Anyone helping her can submit material in Word format and Carol will convert it to HTML. Listserv software has been updated. Fewer false drops. New subscribers must respond to confirmation email to activate subscription. Carol was getting ~50 spammers a day, so this alleviates this problem somewhat, and AALL has also installed a spam catcher. John says focus groups are very pleased with the SANDALL website.

Programs (Betsy) - Our March brownbag will be on gadgets and Web 2.0 databases such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Date to be announced. Speakers will be Brandon Baker, Barbara Glennan and Charles Dean. The Spring Workshop, on Saturday, April 18th at USD, will focus on "Getting the Job Done in a Down Economy". This is a joint workshop with our colleagues at the San Diego Chapter of Special Libraries Association. This workshop will be an economical $10 for SLA and SANDALL members and will include breakfast and lunch. Speakers will include economics professor Alan Gin and various librarians on budget cuts, alternative careers and volunteerism. The Spring Social will be a picnic in Mission Bay on Sunday, May 17th, and will include a raffle and limited auction items. This will be a potluck, with a $5 charge to cover beverages and cake. We need volunteers to handle silly games, the auction, set up, decorations, etc. Betsy will solicit volunteers.

Employment (Arnold Josafat) - Arnold was unable to attend the meeting today. He submitted the following report 2/25/09, to John Adkins. It is reprinted here.

From June 2008 to February 2009, 13 open law library or law library-related positions were advertised on the SANDALL listserv and posted on the SANDALL jobs webpage.  This total not only is less compared to the same period from the previous year (i.e. more than 15), but currently reflects what's available in California only.  Starting in March 2009, more open positions will be listed weekly as the employment search will be expanded nationally and to any library-related position per the SANDALL's president instruction.  In the absence of any advertised open positions, an employment-related article will be posted.

In terms of issues to address for the future, below are a few to consider:

•  Will documentation outlining the charge and duties of the employment chair liaison be available for revision and for use by future SANDALL members?

•  Should a committee of volunteers be created to assist the employment chair liaison in gathering job leads and researching employment articles?

•  How does the separation of the employment chair liaison from the SANDALL executive board help it with the organization's future goals and directions?  Is it better to incorporate this position with another SANDALL position, such as Secretary, public relations chair or membership chair?

The board tabled discussion of these questions to a later time when all members could be present.

The Library School Liaison and Bylaws Committee chairs had nothing to report at this time.

John Adkins closed the board member meeting by thanking all the committee chairs and handing out valentine chocolates. Thank you John!

Meeting adjourned at 1:45 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,