North American Relations Committee Business Meeting

Minutes

March 31, 2001

Art Libraries Society of North America 29th Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA

Present: Pat Lynagh (Board Liaison), Paula Epstein (Chair), Linda Duychak, Alison Pinsler

Recorder: Paula L. Epstein, Chair ; Columbia College,  Chicago ple000@mail.colum.edu

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Introductions were made and a packet of information including an agenda, a copy of the strategic plan, an updated flyer that publicizes this committee, ARLIS/NA and identifies the liaisons.

Reports were given. Pat Lynagh our outgoing Executive Board liaison addressed a number of questions that the committee had, one of which is the need for revising our membership form. To keep liaising with kindred organizations some of those organizations require that we have xx percentage of crossover member (i.e. CAA which requires 25%). We also were able to track additional organizations/associations

ARLIS/NA members were associated with via the membership form. Until joint membership information is systematically gathered and built into the Society membership database a survey maybe distributed to cull out this and other useful information.

Formal reports were then given and a thank you to Pat for her efforts on our behalf.

AAM - Carol Pardo (report given by Paula Epstein)

Carol posted AAM's new museum guidelines on ARLIS-L - Museum Ethic Guidelines on Exhibiting Borrowed Objects and she gave the full text web-site http://www.aam-us.org/borrowob.htm.

AASL - Janine Henry (report given by Paula Epstein)

Janine gave us the new AASL website Paula forwarded that to both ALA ARTS Section and to ARLIS-L to hyperlink. Roberto Ferrari said he is behind on the hyperlinking of

kindred organization.

ALA/ARTS - Paula Epstein

Flyers were created and sent to ALA min-winter. The annual conference (San Francisco) is where I man the affiliates' table and can bring more publicity information - this needs to explored with management and the executive board as to the development of new brochures that tote the benefits of becoming a member. Conference information, meeting

dates, times, locations were posted on each list serve and had the ARLIS conference mentioned at ALA. CAA held their conference in Chicago and some events were on the

Columbia College Chicago campus and therefore had the opportunity to answer queries about jobs/careers in the arts, mentioned ARLIS, and distributed flyers. It was a lost opportunity to not have publicity information available for these CAA members to take with them.

ALA/ALCTS - Suzanne Freeman (report given by Paula Epstein)

Besides being the liaison to ALA/ALCTS Suzanne is also the chairperson of CMDS

Collection Management and Development Section. She said she distributed the flyers and

sings the praises of ARLIS at the ALCTS Strategic Planning retreat, 3 board meetings, 2 CMDS meetings and Executive Board meetings that she has to attend. She also totes ARLIS' organization skills to them and is now encouraging them to summarize, write and publish their conference presentations and have occasional papers.

CAA - Linda Duychak

Linda went to the  CAA conference in Chicago and distributed the flyers. She also lamented the lack of publicity brochures to accompany them and mentioned the poor quality of those she did receive the year before. Mentioned was the difficulty in developing programs and that conference schedule is a lengthy process that takes up to ten months to arrange. So deadlines and session guidelines become very crucial and problematic. CAA can a topical session at ARLIS and ARLIS can have a business meeting at CAA during off times. Linda mentioned that the committee members names were wrong on the committee appointments section of the website and how addresses and email addresses were wrong in the handbook. (since this discussion the committee members names will be updated and the Board/Management team may put out an addendum.

SAA - Alison Pinsler

Alison distributed flyers and she is also a member of AMIA. the American Moving Images Association. There was a lively discussion of archival concerns, digital asset management, preservation, restoration, and conservation issues. She feels that we should try to do more joint programming with SAA and AMIA and that ARLIS needs to keep more current on these very timely topics.

SLA - Laura Ponikvar (report given by Paula Epstein)

Laura posted SLA conference information and mentioned some of the events sponsored by the Museum, Arts, & Humanities Division that would be relevant to ARLIS/NA members.

Strategic Plan 2000-2005

In 1996 NARC was one of three committees established to do outreach- Public Policy and Technology Relations are the other two. It is felt that Goal 3 sections b and c are being met.

Old Business

The membership form was addressed.  As liaisons it is recognized that sometimes due to financial reasons and/or work and time constraints we can not go to all the conferences (notice all the reports given by Paula Epstein) that doesn't mean we aren't fulfilling our duties to get all our information out in a timely manner. One of the difficulties is that of  timeliness, getting information to and from one organization to the next, and trying to meet deadlines or coordinating/creating joint programs. Roger Lawson attended the NINCH's conference's first membership Dec. 1-2 at University of Virginia. Do we need or want other affiliates is also an open discussion bullet point. I did want to mention that we are lucky that two of our liaisons have opened up informal relations with the other organizations they are members of.

New Business

We reiterated some of the issues discussed as to the membership application update, more publicity brochures, having a table for information, how to go about exchanging membership lists, updating of membership handbook so it reflects accurately, updating our website with current committee members and hyperlinking of kindred organizations' websites.