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Board Meeting Minutes |
Page updated: April 25, 2007 |
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9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Attendees: Leila Lyons, Nancy Bauer, Terry Lockard, Bob Haring-Smith, Jen Whiting, Tim Foley, Debbie Fisher, Tim Foley, Theresa Rowe
| Welcome
Introductions |
| CSMS
Leila reviewed the discussions that have been held on-line and among board members. CSMS offers personal networking, professional development, and other things that are not necessarily available at larger conferences. Has a different role from the User Services conference. The two conferences should be seen as a pair, but, at present, they don’t. The board discussed (in yesterday’s meeting) how to make CSMS be seen as more of a compliment and sister conference to the fall conference. The discussion was then opened for input from the members of the CSMS core committee. Theresa Rowe spoke of the need for a clear and compelling reason for why people should attend CSMS. That has to be a marketing goal. She also mentioned that most of the colleagues with whom she spoke at Educause did not know what ACM was. Tim Foley mentioned the planning for professional development, and the scheduling of it, and that we need to be more global in our approach to getting the “Save the Date” information out much earlier. He echoed Theresa’s comments about the lack of knowledge among IT staff of what ACM is. Some of the poster sessions at Educause were essentially about organizations. Bob mentioned that certain disciplinary organizations may not be known among IT personnel. Theresa: The messaging right now is three-fold: educating about ACM, SIGUCCS and CSMS. By the end of the conversation, they do not have a clear understanding of who we are and what CSMS offers. Much of the marketing is going to SIGUCCS members. Need to define target audience and market to them. Jack: I’ve learned in the past several weeks that many people don’t know what CSMS is. We’ve lost focus on explaining to people on what CSMS is and what we are trying to accomplish. Leila: The way CSMS was run in the past, always in St. Louis, always the same people, folk lore passed on how we did things, and this ended up being somewhat insular. Theresa: Calling it the Management Symposium would help to quickly educate the members. Leila: Yes, we are considering a name change to SIGUCCS Management Symposium. I am also going to ask Terry Lockard to liaison to the marketing committee and Jim Bostick to liaison to the Membership committee. Jen asked Tim if he has a sense of what the board feels is a sign of success for CSMS. He responded that in terms of a vision, no there is not a “feed” from the board on what the vision is for the conference. We made a decision about the closing speaker (panel) and trying to build a strong sense of program. At one time, I have heard of this being a CIO conference, and I do not see it being that, and it has never been that. Which level of management are we targeting. It is a richer conference if we have a mix of management. Leila mentioned that if CIOs came here, they provide a mentoring presence for the managers here. We need to have something for those people. In terms of a need that we can fill is this idea of bringing along other staff to that level. Tim mentioned that it is hard to fit this into a CIO schedule. It is very successful to have CIOs on the program as presenters. Sundays seem to be a hard day to start the conference. Theresa has heard it over the years. Also, it is important to keep the whole conference fee under $1500. It would be positive to start the conference on Monday and keep it under $1500. Perhaps we should move it to the end of the school year – to May or June. John mentioned the topic of his talk, bringing to the table an opportunity for mentoring among our members. Teresa Byrd, his co-presenter, will outline the very formal mentoring program she is involved with through ACRL. Tim mentioned that there needs to be a set minimum amount of time between the fall conference and the management symposium, to allow for abstract proposals to be due after the fall conference, with enough time for papers to be submitted in time for the management symposium. Perhaps we could have a kiosk at the fall conference with more verbose information about the offerings of the management symposium. Is it viable to have a vendor show at the management symposium, or should we have them only in joint presentations? Leila mentioned that part of the membership committee’s charge is to collect information about the members, and perhaps we could collect information about the institutions, to use as leverage for vendors participations. For a long while we stayed away from vendors. John Bucher posed the question that we should decide which would be more beneficial: to balance the budget with vendor money, or with more registrations. Perhaps we focus the vendor fair to the fall conference, and the vendors could sponsor both conferences. John feels that there is no problem having funds from the fall conference sponsoring the spring conference. It will be most powerful to have our vendor participation be focused on the organization, with our fair at the fall conference. John mentioned that we should reach out to Teresa Byrd, to see if we could incorporate the mentoring ideas into the offerings |
| Proposal for Supporting the SIGUCCS Annual Conferences and Symposia through Scholarships and Fellowships
Discussion Would it be possible to begin a program for scholarships for attendees. John mentioned that at Educause there are awards given to assist first-time attendees to the Snow Mass conference. ACM accepts and understands these types of funding arrangements for appropriate use of the fund balance. We are also considering funding keynote speakers for the conferences. Jack mentioned how important well-known names attract people to events. John envisions how powerful it would be to offer to attendees the chance to apply for an award for assistance. Perhaps it would be comp’ed rooms and registration. Leila asks if it would be a reasonable addition to the Awards committee set of responsibilities to facilitate the selection of these recipients. Jack mentioned that this could be discussed by the committee. Jack sees it may be more reasonable to have the Awards committee vet the applicants, but to have the program delivered by others. There is a lot to be worked out. The board could work this out on a conference call. John mentioned that having a “New Directors Workshop” which competes with Snow Mass. The Snow Mass event runs in parallel to a Senior Directors Workshop. The content is “meat and potatoes.” Tim Foley’s boss presents there. This could be team-taught. The discussion turned to the presence of ACM/SIGUCCS at the Educause conference. Perhaps we simply try to distribute materials about the management symposium, instead of trying to staff a booth. |
| Conference Updates
Fall 2006 Bob Haring Smith: Alex has drafted a report, but is waiting on the final financial figures. We are waiting on ACM to reveal the final numbers. The final numbers should be available some time in April. A surplus for ~$24,000 is expected. Evaluations that were returned were positive. RegOnline seemed to work as well as could be expected for the first time use. Alex would like to give the final report at the Orlando conference. CSMS 2007 Theresa and Tim: Attendance is not what was hoped for. Difficulty on a management level: board emphasizing a quality program, Jack emphasizing a balanced budget. This sent conflicting signals to the chair. We have quality plenary speakers. Looking forward to a quality program. We worked very hard to get presentations together. Had to recruit very hard to get the proposals they received. The call for proposal does not yield a significant number of proposals (they received only 1 or 2 of the eventual 26 proposals through the CFP). Recommend focus on recruiting track presenters. Theresa will send a long detailed report to the board. Jack presented the budget. Leila reiterated that the success of the conference is about the program that is delivered and the feeling the participants have is positive. The board wants to make it very clear we are very willing to invest in the management symposium so that it is serving the membership community. This is a successful conference, and we hope that the results of the attendee surveys show that. That is how we will judge the value of the conference. Fall 2007 (Orlando) Nancy, reporting for Fall conference committee: registration site is almost ready. TMRF is approved. Checking accounts is established. CFP distributed. Program committee is stabled. 86 abstracts received. We want to make sure that the program committee knows they do not need to accept every submission. The web site went down on the weekend that the submissions were due. Opening plenary speaker is Bob Clougherty (emerging technologies is the topic). Still need a couple of volunteers and a closing plenary speaker. We want to make sure the program committee understands that they do not need to have many sessions at once. We would encourage them to scale back to four concurrent sessions. CSMS 2008 (Tucson) Tim Foley: Tim has formed the conference committee membership. Diane Jung is the program chair. Plans are underway for developing the pre-conference symposium. Do we have enough time to put together a “New Directors Workshop” for this coming conference? Tom Moberg is one possibility for this workshop. Perhaps Dennis Trinkle may make a good plenary session? Tim will talk more with Karen on the pre-conference workshop. Another topic that others may find useful would be new technologies. We want to make sure the committee sees the board as a resource for assistance in drumming up speakers and presenters. Jen will reach out to Tim to have the vendor contributions chair join the fundraising efforts in the new approach. ACM is looking to begin having a conference call with each core committee. Fall 2008 (Portland) Nancy is working on getting the core committee together for this conference. Melissa will stay on as treasurer. Looking for program chair and conference chair. Proposals for 2009 will be sent out by ACM in the near future. Nancy will adjust the days of the conference to have the Management Symposium run Monday – Wednesday. |
| Committee Reports
Awards (Jack Esbin): report from Jack. Communications Awards (Greg Hanek): Greg’s report was given Strategic Planning (Jim Bostick): nothing new to report. Membership (Patti Mitch): looking at tools to use to understand membership. Perhaps we need to articulate the needs of this system. Educause has established a tool for this. It is unfortunate that ACM does not provide this type of service. Perhaps we should make a first step of going to ACM and giving them our needs, and then working with them to have them develop that tool. We need to articulate to the membership committee that we more highly value the momentum around building energy and membership numbers, instead of researching and implementing a new system. And that we push ACM toward more robust access to our membership data. Marketing (Laurie Sutch): just underway. Special Project Report History Project Update (Jack Esbin): Jack met with John Bucher and started working on the history files that John has amassed over the years. |
| Call for Open Items / Closing
A motion to adjourn was made by Terry; motion seconded by Nancy. Meeting adjourned. |
Comments and contributions may be sent to the Information Director at infodir_SIGUCCS@acm.org