Second SLA President’s Column

Here’s a copy of my second column as SLA President. It is in the March 2008 issue of Information Outlook.
Putting Meat on the Bones of Innovation Ideas
In this column I announce the following groups have been formed to do great things for SLA members:
1. Cindy Romaine is leading a large team of SLA volunteers and staff to build and promote the SLA Innovation Laboratory. This will be free to members on the SLA website as a virtual space that will have dozens of licensed and free software as well as thousands of video tutorials for SLA members to engage in learning useful technology, management and leadership skills.
2. Jill Hurst-Wahl is leading a small team of SLA volunteers to create a play area in Second Life for SLA.
3. Deb Hunt is leading our SLA Learning 2.0 team of SLA volunteers. The goal is to launch an international SLA version of the successful and innovative 23 Things, 15 minutes-a-day learning strategy at our annual conference in Seattle in June.
4. Gayle Gossen and Christina de Castell are leading the SLA First Five Years Task Force to survey and offer great learning and networking opportunities for new information professionals.
We also need to spend time in 2008 reinforcing to all members the wonderful progress SLA has made in developing a modern learning suite of services available exclusively to SLA members, including the free eBrary collection of over 1000 management and leadership e-books, thousands of CLICK University courses, degrees and certificate programs and the free course of the month, the free SLA IRC Factiva alerts as well as the free SLA NewsGator information pro RSS feeds. There’s a lot more but this is enough to prove that there’s a ton of value in our SLA membership and what you get for your member ID and password.
Stephen