2006

Town Meeting Discussion on LITA Education Initiatives

LITA members attending the ALA Mid-Winter Conference in San Antonio are invited to attend the LITA Town Meeting, to be held on Monday, January 23, 2006, from 8:00 am- 10:00 am in Salon J of the Marriott Rivercenter hotel in San Antonio, TX.

Previous years’ Town Meeetings have focused on gathering input for the LITA Strategic Plan, which was approved by the LITA Board at Annual Conference 2005 in Chicago ( http://www.ala.org/ala/lita/aboutlita/org/plan.htm ).

This year’s Town Meeting will be a facilitated discussion of the first of the Strategic Plan’s objectives, “to educate.” Aaron Cohen Associates have graciously offered their services to LITA to facilitate the Town meeting. Aaron and Alex Cohen will gather input from LITA members about their visions for putting the objective’s strategies into action.

For those unable to attend the Midwinter conference or the Town Meeting, your voice is still very important. The perspective of members unable to attend conferences is critical to the success of this key strategic initiative. Using this blog-thread, we will do some advance input gathering. We will also use the blog to summarize the discussion after the conference and synthesize the feedback into an action plan.

The Strategic Plan’s first objective, to educate, reads as follows:

Objective 1: To educate
Strategies:

Encourage networking and opportunities for information sharing

Promote shared understanding of technologies as they relate to libraries

Develop and offer programming through opportunities such as the ALA Annual Conference, preconferences and the LITA National Forum

Develop and offer LITA Regional Institutes

Make programming content available through LITA online tools

Identify topics and authors for LITA publications

Explore innovative approaches to LITA publications

Facilitate virtual education opportunities using LITA online tools and other new technologies

Develop and publicize best practice guidelines

The first step of the facilitated discussion will be to understand the current set of services and big picture in which we operate. As such, I have summarized as a starting point, the major initiatives LITA currently supports:

· Develops and offers programming through opportunities such as the ALA Annual Conference, pre-conferences and the LITA National Forum
· Develop and offer LITA Regional Institutes
· Make programming content available through LITA online tools: IG Web pages, LITA Blog
· LITA publications: ITAL, TER, LITA Guides & Monographs
· Networking opportunities: conferences, LITA-L

Please submit your thoughts on

· What LITA should continue to do and what additional educational initiatives it should consider
· How educational programs should be delivered
· How these programs should be funded
· When and where they should be held

I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Bonnie Postlethwaite
LITA President-Elect