Four concepts in this column:

1). Surveys,
2). Dumb comment,
3). Non-conflicting OBS and TS-SIS meetings,
4). Great OBS programs,
5). Great slate of candidates for OBS,
6). “March”ing toward the next TSLL column, and
7). I’ve never been good with math.

#1. Fill out your OBS surveys and return them if you haven’t. Hey, here’s an idea: Do it as soon as you finish reading this column! There is a deadline, but Ellen will take late ones. No prizes this year. No incentives to return the surveys. No dangling carrots. No awards. No plaques. Last year we had 54 returns. There’re over 300 OBS members. If we could just double the 54 there would be frolicking in the halls, jocularity in every office. Serious meetings would turn instantly giddy with silliness as law librarians everywhere would begin skipping, jumping rope, playing hop-scotch and four-square. A few would even swing their keyboard mouse around pretending to create electronic helicopters. Er... I digress. Sorry about that. On to number two.

#2. Yesssss! It looks like at least two my four major goals as your OBS Chair have been met with the hard work of the many colleagues— they were: #1. To avoid the MESS (Meetings Entanglement Scheduling Sections), and second was to ensure continuity of OBS’s four-P’s (Profusion of Pragmatic Programs that Please).

#3. Great news—- the OBS general business meeting and most all other committee meetings will NOT conflict with the TS-SIS meetings this coming AALL annual meeting in Philadelphia!! On Sunday July 16th the OBS business meeting will be held from 5-6 p.m., which is immediately following TS’s business meeting from 4-5 p.m. There are many people to thank for this blessing in our scheduling: Jack Bissett, Pam Reisinger (AALL), and Janet McKinney.

#4. OBS was very fortunate to have 5 out of 6 of our program proposals for the AALL 2000 Annual Meeting approved by the AMPSC. So we can be sure that there will be programs of interest to OBS members to justify your attendance at the Philadelphia meeting next summer.

The accepted programs are:

• Core Competencies for Support Staff: Librarians as Departmental Leaders (program coordinator: Phyllis Post)
• What I Like, Who Has It and Can I Have It? An Update on Library Integrated Systems (program coordinator: Tim Knight).
• Instant Gratification! The Z39.50 Gateway to Searching, Cataloging and ILL (program coordinator: Mary Jane Kelsey)
• The Text Encoding Initiative and Electronic Legal Texts (program coordinator: Kevin Butterfield)
• The Alphabet Soup of Cooperative Cataloging: Leading Through Participation in NACO, SACO, BIBCO, and CONSER (program coordinator: Ellen McGrath)

Titles may change slightly as the programs become a reality, but you can get a feel for the topics. Lots of applause and thank you’s to all the program coordinators who prepared the proposals. It was a lot of work with a tight deadline in August, so their efforts are greatly appreciated. And now they have even more work to do!

OBS would also like to thank Reggie Wallen, AMPSC liaison to OBS. She was a big help in fine-tuning all proposals and advocating our offerings during the AMPSC deliberations.

The members of the OBS Education Committee did a terrific job in reviewing and revising the proposals as well. Thanks to: Virginia Bryant, Kevin Butterfield, Caitlin Robinson, Susan Chinoransky, Susan Goldner, Janet Hedin, Naomi Goodman, Mary Jane Kelsey, Melinda Davis, Phyllis Post, Brian Striman, and Ellen McGrath, Chair.

As you can see, many did double-duty as program proposers. This was a great group and without their volunteering and hard work, we would not have had as many proposals accepted.

#5. Look at this great slate of OBS Officer candidates below. We will be voting on one Vice-Chair/Chair Elect and one Member-at-Large. Watch your mail for the ballots with bios. Many thanks to the OBS Nominating Committee, Arturo Torres, Chair, Sue Roach and Sally Wambold. I know the Committee worked hard to try to find volunteers to be on the ballot representing a diverse selection of organizations, sizes of libraries as well as geographic diversity. If you’ve never been on a nominating committee, you may not understand how difficult this can be. The slate of OBS members is as follows:

• For VC/CE:
  Ismael Gullon (Mercer) &
  Lori A. Hedstrom (West Group)
• For M-A-L:
  Corinne Jacox (Orlando) &
  Susan Chinoransky (George Washington)

#6. For the next TSLL column I hope to write about the SIS leadership retreat that I participated in back in October and to update you on what came out of that meeting. It was very good by the way. Also, I hope to get back to the OBS merger investigation and to tell you about our OBS Web site.