Present: Bev DeWeese (sitting in for Katie Schultz – bibliographies), Janice Dibble (chair), Gary Warren-Niebuhr (chair for 2004), Helene Androski (past chair), Desiree Bongers (new chair elect), Trish Iaccarino Peterson (new secretary – sitting in for Elaine Meyer)

Mary Dunn was re-elected to the board and will be the newsletter editor again. She was not able to be here today.

Kathy Schmidt, web manager for READ, also not able to attend today.

Katie sent bibliographies.

In their absence, Janice thanked Elaine, Katie and Kathy for all of their work as well as thanking board members, Gary and Helene, and Bev DeWeese for their work on behalf of READ and their presentations at WAAL, WAPL and WLA this year.

Membership

The most recent list we have from WLA is dated May 2003. According to this list, we have 217 members. We're doing well with this – people are continuing to rejoin year after year. Janice gave the list to Gary. Janice also has some binders that she wasn’t able to carry due to a dislocated shoulder; she'll get them to Gary via the van delivery system. They contain mostly archival material.

Budget

We were supposed to have a final budget review by Oct. 24, but we haven't received any info. Janice will send a report out whenever we get information.

Mary sends the newsletters to the WLA office to be printed. We’re assuming we’re being charged for this, but we’re not sure. Janice will check.

Janice asked if Bev got a reimbursement check for WAPL. Bev said no, but then she's never gotten reimbursed for it in the past and isn’t too worried about it.

Newsletter

Mary no longer has a backlog of articles. Bev suggested we put an announcement on our Web page three or four months prior to the next publication date asking people to submit articles. Helene suggested that we announce this on the listserv as well as most people probably pay more attention to email than they do to the Web site. Bev said it might help if Mary gave some suggestions as to what types of articles we could use. We need to make sure that Mary’s just *editing* the newsletter and not doing the actual writing. Bev suggested Gary submit some of his reviews for inclusion. Bev has done this in the past as well as submitted book lists and "good read" recommendations. People doing city-wide reads might want to utilize the newsletter as well. Janice mentioned there was an article in Library Journal recently about Web-based readers advisory. We might want to try something like this.

Bibliographies

We have been revising and updating some of our older bibliographies; however, we really need some new ones or a new approach. Helene put together a new one recently, but we could use more. We talked about putting a bunch of book lists or bookmarks together. The problem is that no one’s compiled any recently (i.e., book lists). Bev wondered if libraries compile their own book lists... she assumes they do.

Gary asked how much we actually make on the bibliographies we sell. Since labor and printing is all donated, anything they bring in is profit. Bev thought we’ve probably made several hundred dollars on these to date, but no one’s really sure. We do know that they sell well (in the WLA store). Gary thought maybe we should report in future newsletters on how many we’ve sold and what they've brought in in terms of funding so people will know they’re a money-maker for the Readers section. This is important because everything we do at WAPL we have to pay for. The more money we make from bibliography sales, the better speakers we can bring in.

Bev put together a bibliography on discussable books and book groups and brought 50 of them with her to WLA. They've all sold. Kathy Morrison did an updated edition on female sleuths, and she just completed a new one on holiday mysteries. If we publicized these more, people might be willing to contribute material. Katie will be working on some new ones. Bev volunteered to continue working on them, too. Janice will check if we are able to sell at WAPL, during our programs and/or sell individually during the year to people who don’t get to WLA or to the WLA Store.

Programs

We discussed ways we could potentially compile book lists as part of WAPL programs. Bev mentioned that in the past she’s asked (via our newsletter) for people to send her recommended titles, but she hasn’t gotten much of a response. She wondered about the possibility of putting together a mini-workshop at WAPL where we'd pick 2 or 3 themes and compile a communal book list as part of the workshop. For example, we could have a workshop on "gentle reads" and collect a couple of titles from each person that we could include in a bibliography. Gary thought maybe we could make this a part of a program or book discussion group instead - put a book list together at the end of the program after collecting titles from the audience. Those who weren't interested could leave – others could stay and help compile the list. He’s done this at his library without *a lot* of success, but several members thought it might be worth experimenting with this at WAPL.

Bev wondered if we were doing any genre workshops/discussions at WAPL – we are – so maybe we could try collecting recommended titles as part of this. We could print the lists on bookmarks and/or post them on the Readers' section Web page. Helene doesn't want to get away from having print copies, though - and it's easy to do it in both formats. Janice thought smaller libraries would really like getting these because they rarely have time to create their own book lists. Katie and Bev could put them together in some kind of package for libraries. Helene mentioned that we already have a link on the Web page to some book lists that Kathy did, so there’s a home for electronic versions already.

Desiree wondered what we thought about doing a program at WAPL on adult summer reading programs. We could share tips on what works and what doesn’t. She also thought we could try doing a program on Reader’s Advisory on the Web.

South Central LS has done programs on summer reading programs in the past and has gotten good attendance – so these types of programs generally go over well. Janice mentioned the Library Journal article said libraries should do more than just post lists. Helene suggested we look into getting someone from Morton Grove to talk about their Webrary program. We don’t have the funding to do anything fancy at WAPL this year, but if it’s successful, we might have money for next year for a speaker or whatever. We usually get only two slots at WAPL. We normally do a genre program that parallels the Notable Books Marathon – although we don’t necessarily have to do that this year. We could do a Web program instead. Gary likes leading book discussion groups. We could do something like a discussion group in the evening of a book that's been made into a movie, and then show the movie afterwards. This would not be a program – it would be an evening social event. Helene thinks we should do an evening book discussion next year at WLA, too... this years' was very well received. It was a good alternative for people who didn’t want to go out. If we do a session on summer reading programs, Helene suggested we break it down by size of library, because different sized libraries may use different approaches.

There was an email that came out recently from Don Litzer. His library (McMillan PL in Wisconsin Rapids) was asked to be an ALA library for "Library Networks for Literature" – he was asking for co-sponsors. We could consider co-sponsoring this. <Note: Janice notified Don that we would be interested in co-sponsoring but not sponsoring a meeting since we already have identified programs we want to offer. We could post information about LNL on the READ section of the WLA web site.>

Janice thought maybe we could ask for three slots so we could continue the genre fiction program as well as try some of the other suggestions. The genre fiction program has been a good one for us. In the past we've had panels with one person discussing romances, another mysteries, another sci fi, etc. What other genres could we cover? Janice would like to see popular genres like legal fiction, too. How about Christian fiction? Helene wondered about doing a notable genre fiction program at WLA next year as well. It’d be a nice option for academic librarians who normally don't get involved in this kind of activity. Or would it seem too similar to Notable Books Marathon to do it at WLA?

Desiree hasn’t started thinking about WLA 2004 yet. Helene said we'll definitely need to start planning by January. Usually upcoming WLA planning begins at WLA the previous year. Desiree should check with the WLA office to see if a planning meeting is scheduled.

Old Business

Helene was involved in the book discussions at the Wisconsin Book Festival. James Gollata and David Brostrom each led a discussion on different Wallace Stegner titles. These were truly appropriate programs for the book festival and they were very well received, so we should definitely plan on doing them again next year.

New Business

Long Range Plan of Service (Gary) – our goals were to compile five bibliographies, do two programs at WLA and one program at WAPL (we usually do more than this). As usual, we've met these goals.

Someone wondered if we could get Nancy Pearl to speak.

There is lots of interesting and unusual fiction coming out right now in the contemporary fiction area. Do we have a record anywhere of genre programs we've done in the past? Helene wasn’t sure there were lists as such, but there would be notes about programs we've done in the binders that are going to Gary.

Gary said the group will be glad to make suggestions to Desiree for possible WLA programs.

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