Busy Morning at Affiliate Assembly

The second round of AASL Affiliate Assembly started with a regional meeting.  Massachusetts belongs to Regional 1, which is comprised of the New England states.  We began by creating a Google doc we can use to streamline communications among state organizations both to collect necessary information and to share concerns and commendations.  We also had brief conversations about managing ipads and apps in schools and teacher evaluations and how they impact school librarians. 

Announcements:

·         AASL Library Task Force discussed initiatives to advocate for school library programs at the national level.  There is a huge push right now to ensure school libraries are included in ESEA funding.  We are also being asked to identify administrators in each state who can assist in national advocacy efforts. 

• ·         Chris Harris reported out on work being done on e-books.  ALA has e-content blog that covers what is going with e-books and all new development at http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/e-content .   The  e-content group is also developing tip sheets about managing e-books in your library and talking points about using e-books.
• ·          AASL has formed a retirement SIG that is getting very active. 
• ·         Fall Forum—Transliteracy and the School Library Program.  Details are at http://www.ala.org/aasl/conferencesandevents/fallforum/fallforum
• ·         Banned website awareness day, October 3, 2012:  http://www.ala.org/aasl/aaslissues/bwad/bwad
• ·         NASTEMP:  National Association of State Media Professionals—looking to connect to state organizations representing school libraries to coordinate state level information--http://nastemp.wikispaces.com/;  one big initiative is to work with directors of school library programs at the district level
• ·         Beyond Words, Allison Cline:  provides grants for public school libraries affected by disasters (begun in response to Hurricane Katrina) but now expanded to any disaster
• ·         ALA Washington Office expressed commitment to working on school library advocacy; have developed many documents that they will share for state advocacy efforts
• ·         National Center for Literacy Education—group affiliated with National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is now looking to work with AASL

Elected officers to run AASL Affiliate Assembly

We voted to commend several excellent national programs fostering literacy, developing library leadership, using primary sources, and providing professional development in innovative ways.  Valerie Diggs and I discussed reviewing these models to see how some may be adopted for use in Massachusetts.

AASL voted to as the AASL board to:

·         take actions to improve communications and orientation for members of the affiliate assembly

·         to form a task force to look into the research and implications of moving from Dewey organization of collection to organizing collections by genres

·         to charge the AASL Research and Statistics Committee to create a comprehensive school library studies database

Susan Ballard challenged each librarian present to submit a lesson plan to the L4L database this summer.