[Add your notes here]

DRAFT 2

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Town hall notes and feedback: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1On9FTbKuezm8ahsTwFhDOWh_4sXa8vdFEEXIT0h0zn Y/edit?usp=sharing

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Standards and Guidelines committee:

● Recommendation 4: Members were concerned about the level of work required of single individuals in the Coordinator roles. Concerns related to both overwhelming a single individual and potential circumstances when the Coordinator was unable to perform the required functions. In the proposed model, there is no one designated to “pick up the slack.”

● Recommendation 5: Member comments centered primarily on this recommendation as it deals directly with the Standards & Guidelines Committee. ○ The Committee does not agree that it has “struggled with” its charge. If there is a struggle, it is with keeping up with the work required of the committee. It can be difficult to coordinate with the various committees responsible for guidelines and to keep them moving forward. ○ The new division of work between the Professional Development and the proposed Professional Resources Committees and the RUSA Office will require clear charges and documentation of communication. As the recommendations stand, it is unclear who will be responsible for what, which could lead to no work, or repetitive work, being done. ○ The Committee believes greater coordination of text documents (e.g. guidelines, best practices, toolkits) produced by RUSA makes sense, but does not want to be responsible for maintaining webinar archives. This seems to be a role best (and already) fulfilled by the RUSA Office. It was suggested that it might be better to think of Standards & Guidelines being absorbed into Publications and Communications as a way of understanding the new division of work. ○ The Committee is unclear on what the Publications and Communications Committee has been responsible for and thus doesn’t understand what that committee’s sunset would add to its workload. ○ The Committee would like to know more about the Learning Archive mentioned as part of its new responsibilities. We have not seen the Task Force report nor do we know of any work being done on this project. ○ The Committee believes it would be expected to take a role in developing policies for best practices and toolkit creation. ○ The name Professional Resources seems too broad a name for what the Committee sees as its new responsibilities. ○ The Committee believes for true streamlining to occur, the RUSA Board needs to delegate authority to the Committee to vote on and move things forward without the extra layer of board approval. One such area could be allowing RUSA Standards & Guidelines to vote to sunset outdated guidelines and proceed with that process without additional Board approval. Another suggestion was to write into some document that Board approval is only necessary when there is no clear majority within the Committee. ------

Respondant: 3

I'm so sorry not to be at Midwinter at this time for RUSA. There is a lot more in the ByLaws that need to be changed. Why this first? We have just gone through a crisis of leadership, now we are looking to change the who can lead. I say too much too soon.

http://www.ala.org/rusa/about/strategic-priorities/bylaws

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Respondant: 2 The only recommendations that I disagree with are 1) eliminating Exec as I found a group of 5 a very good size for real conversation. At least the VP, Pres, Past-Pres (if not also the Councilor and Secretary) should continue to meet on an informal - but encouraged - basis between conferences and on Fridays at conference. Since I am a past-past-whatever-Pres now this doesn't affect me, it is just an observation. 2) I think we might want one at-large director since not all members are in Sections and if we are expanding non-Section participation options this is something to consider. But, I don't feel too strongly about it.

In terms of the new CE role - do you think that this could be combined with the RUSA liaison to the Conference Program Planning? There is also an ALA TOLD committee (Training, Orientation and Leander Development) that this person could liaise to if that group is still active. (The Connect group for TOLD has nothing after 2015.) I am not sure that the Education Assembly liaison is very critical. I realize that these would probably need to be future recommendations and not changes to the existing document. Having appointed liaisons and served as an ALA liaison, the some of the roles could be adjusted to make them more interesting and also more connected to RUSA beyond just sending a report to Board and should be reviewed with the people who have recently served in the roles.

DRAFT 1

Respondant 1:

Hello, Beth. I will probably not be able to participate in the Town Hall meeting on Thursday, so am sending a few questions and comments re the proposed RUSA Division-Level changes. I wanted to mention, though, that although I'm a fairly new Co-Editor of the RUSQ Information Literacy and Instruction column, I'm not too familiar with RUSA's Division structure. So, I don't know how useful my comments and questions will be, but thought I'd send them along in case they might be.

That being said, I thought the recommendations looked good, especially the idea of continuous review. I do have questions and comments about 3 of the recommendations, though. First, Recommendation 2, the proposed Leadership Council, sounds like it'll have a very large membership. That may be ok, though it did make me wonder about using such a large group to review and advise on the budget developed by the RUSA President. I guess I'm also in the dark about a couple of other things re Division-level budgets. Does the RUSA President currently develop a budget and then send it to the Budget & Finance Committee? And, I wonder, too, how other ALA Divisions handle their budgets. I really don't know what would work best, so am just posing some questions.

Recommendation 7, for a continuous review process sounds really good, and I think there should be some emphasis on developing that model as soon as possible. I didn't see a timeline there, so that's why I'm mentioning this.

Recommendation 8, regarding clarifying the use of Ad Hoc Committees and Task Forces, sounds really good too, but I didn't see any specifics, other than avoiding miscommunication and redundancy. I think it would help to identify some overall principles, possibly including use of one or the other term--Ad Hoc Committee, or Task Force--or definitions of when one would appoint one, as opposed to the other. Other overall principles could include typical membership size of these temporary groups, typical timeline (1 year, 2 years), line of reporting, the fact that each is required to report on progress at each ALA Conference, that each should have a charge with set goals, and that all of these temporary groups be listed in one place, with their charges, regardless of which Section appoints them. Another possibility would be to require those who want to appoint this kind of temporary group to review the existing temporary groups for similar charges, and make efforts to coordinate or collaborate with other Sections or those who have already appointed temporary groups. It might also be helpful to provide a list of areas that these kinds of temporary groups could explore, and perhaps maintain a database of ideas for their work, solicited from RUSA members. That's about all I can think of at the moment. Hope this is a bit helpful.