Reader’s Section
Minutes from 11/02/2006 Business Meeting
Present: Maureen Welch (chair), Catherine Hansen (vice chair), Laurie Freund (incoming secretary), Gary Warren Niebuhr (guest), Trish Iaccarino (secretary), Anne Kasuboski (Literary Awards chair), Colleen Crowley (incoming vice chair)
Meeting was called to order at 7:30 a.m.
Approval of Minutes
Minutes from May 4, 2006 were approved. No one could remember the specific changes we made to the bylaws except that they were minor – mostly wording issues. There is a copy in the secretary’s notebook. In the future, WLA may have bylaws and committees and sections will have policies and procedures.
Membership
Maureen received an updated membership list from Brigitte in May. We have over 100 members. Trish verified that Brigitte Vacha regularly adds any new READ members to the listserv.
Budget
The Literary Awards Committee was slightly over budget this year. We pay for mileage and other expenses related to committee work. The Banta Corporation just pays for the award and related expenses. Banta donated $1950 this year. $1000 goes to the author and the rest goes towards directly-related items such as bookmarks (the Children’s Book Award Committee also partially funds the bookmarks). The section does have some project money that in the past we’ve used towards items such as brochures, but we’ve found that brochures are not particularly effective anymore. We can use the money for other activities such as programming (and we should – this funding is starting to accumulate!)
There will be a leadership conference on Dec. 8 that’s open to new officers of WLA (including section and committee officers). Budgeting and programming will be covered at this conference.
Programming
WAPL – We sponsored the Genre Books Marathon, a book
discussion, and “Read ‘Em Their Writes” (
WLA – the book discussion had about 35 participants, the Notable Books Marathon, about 75.
Several of the programs we sponsor are very easy to put together – for example, the Banta program, the book discussions, and the marathons. So the vice chair really only needs to come up with 1-2 program ideas per conference. If more than a couple of program proposals are submitted, we should preference those we *really* want to do in case not all of our proposals are accepted.
We need to specify a time slot for the Banta program because it needs to be on the same day as the awards banquet.
Helene submitted at least one program proposal to
Since WAPL is in
One idea for a WLA program for next year is something on books derived from blogs (such as the “Julie and Julia Project”).
Bibliographies
Katie Schultz is in charge of these. They are sold at the WAPL and WLA conferences. Proceeds go to READ. We could use some new ones; maybe we can solicit some from the membership.
Book Kits
The Reference and Loan Library and the Readers’ Section have lists of those libraries that have book kits for loan. Milwaukee Public Library recently added 15 of these kits; we need to update the list to reflect this.
We need to consider whether or not we should maintain our list, since Reference and Loan has one as well. Ours includes a sentence or two about the book, whereas theirs does not. However, it’s something that must be maintained constantly. Do we want to keep doing this?
Newsletter
We agreed the newsletter should be electronic from now on. We’ll just put a link to it from our Web page. People may be more likely to look at other things on our page, too, if they have to go there to access the link. We’ll discuss this idea with Mary and Brigitte.
Web Page
Our Web page could use some updating. The first order of business is to update the officer list. We can probably delete some of the older stuff on the page. We need to find out if we should be updating the Literary Awards Web page as well, or if someone else is maintaining theirs.
Literary Awards
Anne will be chairing the committee again this year. There are three vacancies, so Catherine will need to appointment three new members. Anne knows of two interested people; Maureen still has some email messages from last year from people who were interested. She can check to see if they’re still interested. Once Catherine has selected the new members, she’ll forward the names to Brigitte to verify that they’re members of WLA and READ (they do not need to be current members of READ, but they’ll need to join for next year). Once verified, these names will then go to Anne.
Anne may delegate a few responsibilities to other LA Committee members this year, like developing the brochure. There are too many responsibilities for one person to comfortably handle, and involving people in some of these activities may get them thinking about serving as a future chair.
Old Business
Nothing that hasn’t already been discussed.
New Business
There was a short discussion of what to do with the members at large (MAL) positions in the future. Currently, one MAL is in charge of the bibliographies, a second maintains the Web page, and the third does the newsletters. However, we would like to recruit more members onto the board – maybe MAL positions could serve as a good “springboard” into the secretary and vice chair/chair positions. We may consider separating these three responsibilities from MAL positions and allow those who are currently working on these projects to continue doing so. This way we can free the positions up for new people. Catherine will check the bylaws on the terms of members at large.
Meeting was adjourned at 8:40 am.