A Message from the Senior Executive Board Member

Consider this an open invitation to attend the next ICON meeting on May 24th at Bellevue University (for directions, see map). This meeting represents our annual “Mini-MLA” meeting where those ICONers lucky enough to attend the annual meeting of the Medical Library Association share with the rest of us information about the program, continuing education, and social aspects of the meeting. Complete with a table of goodies gleaned from the conference, this is a must for all members. In addition to informal sharing, this year’s MLA scholarship award winner will make a presentation about the conference. The program promises to be a good one.

Your Consumer Health Grant Steering Committee has also been busy. A complete report will be given at the May 24th business meeting, but good progress is being made to fulfill the goals and objectives of the grant. It is important to get your feedback on progress so your attendance at the business meeting is highly desired.

At our meeting in March we began an informal sharing session during the introductory part of the business meeting. We will continue this informational sharing, so I encourage all of you to be thinking about news from your library or personal life that you want to share with the rest of the group.

I leave you with a quote from "Bright Future for the Academic Library" by Deanna B. Marcum, which appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of AGB Priorities. AGB Priorities is a membership service of the Association of Governing Boards and is designed to help trustees and chief executives identify and address strategic policy issues. While this publication is geared to academic institutions, it is highly appropriate for all libraries. Appearing on page 9 of the previously mentioned publication is the following:

“Technology has turned our long-comfortable linear world into a sometimes-chaotic new order. But by its very nature, access to electronic information will depend on the methods of the information’s creator, on a library’s ability to validate and organize the information, and on the information technologist's skills in electronic networking. The librarians who oversee this transition must be prepared to take substantial risks, consult widely among different constituencies, and build consensus among individuals with disparate views and perspectives. All leaders of this transformed library must imagine what is possible and help … users perceive the vision and find their own ways of realizing it.”

In other words, we have the opportunity to be information leaders in our institutions as long as we’re willing to take some calculated risks, and it is going to be a wonderfully rocky ride.

See you on the 24th.

--Jim Bothmer, Senior Executive Board Member


Return to Summer 2000 ICONnection Table of Contents