The American Association of School
Libraries (AASL) Affiliate Assembly meets twice during the ALA annual
meeting. Two delegates from each state
(Judi Paradis and Ann Perham represent Massachusetts and Valerie Diggs is on
the Board of AASL) meet with delegates from throughout the country to offer
commendations for excellent programs and to discuss concerns brought up by
delegates. These are vetted by the AASL
board and then brought to the assembly for discussion and voting. At our Friday night meeting , we split into
groups to discuss three major concerns:
·
A perceived need that AASL affiliate members
need improved means of communication, especially as we are trying to
collaborate on projects across distance
·
State organizations are being asked for advice
on reorganizing school library collections by genre (the bookstore model)
instead of by Dewey Decimal, and would like some direction from AASL about what
to recommend to members
·
A proposed project that would assemble a
comprehensive database of school library research in one common format that
could be easily searched and understood by library stakeholders; this came
about when Pennsylvania School Library Association was asked for this by their
state legislators and school administrators and discovered that this did not
exist in one easy-to-find place
I sat with the group working on this
final concern and we worked to come up with a specific action to be voted on at
our Sunday meeting that we believed would lead to the development and ongoing
maintenance of a user-friendly, searchable database of school library research
that will help members make the case for funding and supporting school library
programs.
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