What professional involvement means to me

As the end of the financial year comes closer, ALIA National Office has started to actively promote joining, renewing or rejoining the Association. This of course leads to the usual questions of "why should I join?", "what does ALIA do for me?" or "ALIA does nothing for publics/specials/academics".


Is any of this true? It depends on how you look at it. For me, ALIA gives me exposure to more than just the field I am working in (publics). I go to a lot of PD events that are organised by Viclink and the State Library of Victoria and I enjoy them immensely. They give me the opportunity to network with those who are in the same sector and sometimes the same field. This is not enough for me though. I didn't become a librarian with thoughts of always staying in the same sector. ALIA gives me the opportunity to network extensively with people outside of public libraries - that is important to me. I like the fact that I am involved in an Association that is working for the entire library and information field, not just one particular sector. I see issues such as workforce planning as something that needs to be looked at holistically from a national perspective, not only a local, sectoral one, as it has implications for the profession and industry as a whole.


What else have I gained through my involvement with ALIA?

• The Aurora scholarship - by my calculations, I am about 13 years ahead in my subscription fees, just by receiving that scholarship, and that is allowing for inflation. One of the criteria for the scholarship, BTW, is to "provide evidence of personal commitment and contribution to ALIA", so my involvement also helped me get the scholarship.
• Confidence to present at conferences and events and share my knowledge with others.
• Project management skills.
• Budgetary skills - managing a budget with over a $100k turnaround is not something that happens every day.
• The ability to be involved, from the beginning, in a tender process that, again, would not have happened easily (and boy can I read fine print now!).

These are just a few things and ALIA President, Derek Whitehead, gives more in his first Frontline as President.

There will always be 'detractors', and they have a right to their opinions, just as members have a right to theirs. What they are not entitled to is to continually criticise those who do actively participate, as it belittles the hard work that is being put in.

For me, the benefit I get from ALIA is that I am not only getting my own professional development, but also giving back to the profession.

ALIA and employer support

I was talking to a colleague the other day about the amount of support that employers give to employees to conduct professional Association contributory business during work time. She was amazed that some employers do not support ALIA associated work and I was just as astounded at the extent of the support her employer gave her - ALIA committee work is even put into her annual workplan as part of professional development.

A leading library service has made comments that Association related work is not 'real life', budgeting for events that had a turnover of hundreds of thousands of dollars was not applicable to a work scenario and working with volunteer committees had no bearing on staff management in the workplace.

Whilst I am not surprised by this attitude, I am disappointed. If working for a volunteer association does not constitute 'real life' or 'real work', then what does it constitute? Sure it is great professional development and good learning for the participant, but learning such as this has to be better utilised when applied in the workplace.

So what does constitute Association related workplace support? That's an interesting question. Once I would have thought it was something as simple as dialling into a conference call during work time or receiving phone calls in the workplace, but I have been surprised by the level of support from some employers. As I mentioned earlier, one colleague has ALIA related work inserted as an output in her annual workplan, so she is able to dedicate time during her work day to Association related work, others, although having no formal work plan in place, can dial into teleconferences, send and receive emails. write reports and attend meetings during their work day. Of course, I wouldn’t expect that this would be done all day, every day, but obviously there is trust in the staff to be able to deliver their own work objectives.

So what are the worst examples of lack of support that I have heard about? Library staff needing to stay back to 'make up' time used during the day to answer Association related emails, emails being monitored, not encouraging contribution to professional literature, refusing to fund conference attendance yet applying it to a workplace training plan and (perhaps) the most disappointing of all, that a library service is too small to support Association related work. Surely investing staff time in something as important as growing the profession and professional development would outweigh such an outlook?

NLS4 - right on track!

What can I say? Work and life just seemed to get in the way. Having said that, so many things have happened that I won't enter them all on this post, or it will go on forever! I am not even sure that I can list them in order!!!

NLS4

Last time I posted about NLS4, we had just appointed ICMS as our Professional Conference Organiser. Since then there has been a change in the Committee - Andrew Finegan is now our Marketing and Promotions Coordinator. As well as this **breaking news** the NLS4 website is now officially open and launched! The team decided to launch the site on August 20 (I am behind!) at ALIA's 70th birthday celebrations - we were proud to have one of our milestones linked with such a significant one for the Association.

Something that made me especially proud was the way the team pulled together so we could deliver on time. We all had our own components to deliver to Jill, our fabulous Website Coordinator and we all did it, with time to spare for playing with the aesthetics of the website itself. This is no mean feat, as the committee is spread across four states! Well done Team!

And the latest news - announced yesterday - is that the NLS4 website now is RSS enabled, so anyone can subscribe to the feed and let all the updates come to them, rather than keep checking the site - Andrew and Jill worked well together to get that happening.

We are in negotiations with our preferred venue at the moment - we can't say anything yet, but the team does promise that it will not disappoint!!! What is next? Stay tuned - we will get our patron competition up and running soon....