President’s Message Cindi Trainor INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2013 1 It's fall already, and for LITA that means some exciting things! The Program Planning Committee is hard at work evaluating the sixty-plus program proposals that have been submitted. The new conference format specified by ALA means that we have 20 slots for LITA programs at Annual, including the President's program and Top Tech Trends. The PPC certainly has its work cut out! Well before Midwinter in Philadelphia will be National Forum 2013. I'm so excited that this year's Forum is going to be in my home state of Kentucky. Join us from November 7-10 in "Luhvuhl" (Louisville) for great keynotes, preconference workshops, concurrent sessions, and of course, networking opportunities. Travis Good from Make Magazine will deliver our opening keynote, Nate Hill from Chattanooga Public Library is up on Saturday, and Emily Gore from the Digital Public Library of America closes out the Forum on Sunday. I hope you'll join us for an exciting Forum in the Bluegrass State. In governance news, the Board of Directors identified three goal areas on which we will concentrate this year: stabilizing the budget, engaging members, and growing membership. We are eagerly awaiting the final report of the Financial Stability Task Force, led by Tom Wilson and Andrew Pace; they presented preliminary findings at the Board meeting in Chicago in July. We are currently updating the strategic plan, which was last updated in 2010—watch the LITA-L list and the blog for more. We would love your input on them! If you're interested in LITA governance, check out the Board's space on ALA Connect. Many discussion posts are open, and we welcome your comments! You can also complete this form (http://www.ala.org/lita/about/board/contact) to reach out to the Board anytime. The Board will be having several meetings this fall: The Executive Committee is tentatively meeting September 30; the Forum Steering Committee will meet after Forum 2013; the Budget Review committee will be meeting at the ALA Joint Boards meeting in late October; and the entire Board will have an online meeting before we convene in person in Philadelphia. Watch LITA-L for the announcements; we welcome you as guests to all our meetings. Finally, for those of you interested in leadership but not necessarily ready to run for Board, I want to point you to documents put together by the LITA Emerging Leaders team in 2013: http://connect.ala.org/node/197839 Our team of three ALA Emerging Leaders, Margaret Heller, Zach Coble, and Katie Heidgerken- Greene, surveyed LITA leaders, worked with Committee Chairs Coordinator Michelle Frisque and IG Chairs Coordinator Paul Keith, and synthesized tons of information and many documents into the Leadership Guide for New Chairs of Committees and Interest Groups Cindi Trainor (cindiann@gmail.com) is LITA President 2013-14 and Community Specialist & Trainer for Springshare, LLC. http://litablog.org/ http://www.ala.org/lita/about/board/contact http://www.ala.org/lita/about/board/contact http://connect.ala.org/node/197839 http://connect.ala.org/node/209032 mailto:cindiann@gmail.com PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE | TRAINOR 2 (http://connect.ala.org/node/209032). They also created a sample Leadership Game (http://www.gloriousgeneralist.com/leadership.html) to test our leadership knowledge, and presented their work at the Emerging Leaders poster session in Chicago. The Leadership Guide will inform future orientation activities for Committee and IG chairs and will then be handed over to the Bylaws & Organization Committee to be incorporated into the LITA Manual. Thank-you for being a LITA member! I hope to see you at a future event. My fellow Board members and I welcome your comments and suggestion--for program ideas, workshop or online class ideas, and for how we can keep LITA awesome. :) http://connect.ala.org/node/209032 http://www.gloriousgeneralist.com/leadership.html http://www.gloriousgeneralist.com/leadership.html