1. Office Name: Secretary
2. Office Term (Date: Ex. 2004-2005): 2003-2004
3. Submitted By: Chrissie
Anderson Peters
4. Date of Report Submission: February 12, 2004
5. Email Address: ChrissieNMRT@yahoo.com
6. What kind of interaction have you had with your committees thus far this year? What support have you been able to provide them?
In addition to regular emails of passing along information and asking general questions, I had the opportunity to spend time with both of my committee Chairs at the All-Committee Meeting (a.k.a. “Big Tent”) at Midwinters in San Diego and talk about what had been going on in both of their committees, as well as some of their goals and commitments for the upcoming committee year (both Anna Ferris of Archives and Stephanie DeClue of Handbook are remaining on for a second term as Chairs of their respective committees). Just before Midwinters, Anna and I had been discussing the feasibility of a “policy” for Secretaries' Board Minutes and she and her committee submitted an informal proposal that has now gone before President Beth Kraemer and myself that we believe will make Board Minutes more uniform from Secretary to Secretary, and therefore more accessible to anyone looking for information in such documents in the Archives, as well as easier for the Archives Committee to enter for the sake of history and posterity. Since that time, I have begun restructuring the Board Minutes for this committee year to fit that policy's format.
I also attended an ALA training session with Stephanie DeClue at Midwinters to help enable us to better serve NMRT in terms of web site content. Up until this time, I have still depended on past-Secretary Bill Armstrong to make changes to the official NMRT website content; likewise, Stephanie has had to rely on an already-swamped Web Committee in NMRT, headed by Debby Andreadis. Now that we have a little bit of experience with it, and a training booklet to help guide us, we hope that things can be updated more quickly and efficiently. Stephanie has dug in wholeheartedly and begun changing/updating committee charges and information that her committee has been gathering over the past two committee years.
7. What would you still like to accomplish in your office
before the end of your term?
I still hope to develop
more online materials for members to have available to them when asked to speak
about NMRT for local, state, or regional professional organizations/
associations. Thus far, I have developed a bookmark and passed it on to Kim Wobick and Lyssa Oberkreser of the Student and Student Chapter Outreach
(SASCO) Committee. That information will eventually be posted on their website,
but is available currently through Kim, Alyssa, or myself as a Word or PDF file
(for PDF's, contact me). I also hope to simplify some
of the routine of the Secretary's position through creating a few more
templates for record keeping. I have already constructed a Reports Template for
the purpose of recording which officers/committees have filed their reports,
thereby facilitating the task of emailing those who have not yet submitted
reports and reminding/asking them to do so. I have also produced an Attendance
Sheet for Board Meetings that lists the offices and committees and can easily
be used in subsequent terms by other Secretaries just by filling in the names
of the current year's officers and chairs. Likewise, I have set up a list of
those committees whose reports are filed at “odd” times – those committees
whose appointments run from Midwinters to Midwinters, in hopes to alert the next Secretary to this
fact earlier than I was. Related, I have made a template of Supervising
Officers and the committees that they oversee for future use, too.
I hope to find the time
(and patience), to go in and make more changes to the NMRT site, which sorely
need to be performed (i.e., updating all instances of Bill Armstrong's name and
contact information to mine and making sure that such information is switched
over to the new Secretary's information once the upcoming election results are
announced).
I also hope to help
Stephanie De Clue find some more folks to serve on the Handbook Committee.
While most of Anna's Archives Committee stayed on from the past term, none of
Stephanie's did. Since Midwinters, she has had two
new members join her committee, but could certainly use more folks than that to
accomplish the committee's goals in the new/current committee term.
In short, I want to wrap up the projects that I have begun during this term to help insure that things are more settled for the next Secretary than they were when I entered the position. I also want to suggest that the newly-elected Secretary be able to attend the ALA Web Training in Orlando so that he/she does not have to wait so late into his/her term to feel like he/she has some sense of control over the position and its responsibilities.