Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Continuing Education Fund
ALA  Midwinter Meeting, Washington, D.C. Tuesday, February 18, 1997

I. Overview of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Continuing Education Fund
A. Background - In July of 1996 Godort accepted a gift of $2000 from  Jack
Sulzer to establish a  Continuing Education Fund to be used for the support
of projects to develop electronic and distance education resources that
will assist librarians in the transition to the electronic dissemination of
government information.
B. Who we are - At the second meeting of Steering in New York, Steering
created an  Ad Hoc Committee on the Continuing Education Fund consisting of
2 members from Gitco and 2 from Education.  The current members from GITCO
are  Jocelyn Tipton (chair), and Andrea Morrison  and Trisha Cruse and Amy
Spare from Education.

II. The Charge (Appendix I)  and how we've completed it
A. Develop  several proposals for specific projects to be funded from the
Continuing Education Fund.  -	See section III below

	B. Develop procedures for soliciting wide participation in the submission
of proposals.
Andrea Morrison conducted a literature search and others on the committee
investigated persons or institutions that have been involved with
continuing education of librarians, distance education training programs,
and management skills training.  A bibliography of our findings is
available upon request. (Appendix II)
Committee members monitored listservs to see if these issues were being
dealt with.  
Sent survey questionnaires to organization identified in part 3 of the charge.
Sent  email message to govdoc-l and GITCO and Education members who
expressed an interest in helping at Annual.
Met jointly with the Education and Government Information Technology
Committeees.

C. Investigate specific resources within  the library community.
Using the ALA Handbook of Organization, we identified groups that we felt
were interested in the issues we were dealing with.  The Chairs of each of
these groups were sent a survey to identify what was being done already.
(Appendix III)
Investigated ways that other library organizations were dealing with these
issues, including SLA, CRL, ARL , ASIS.

D. Investigate proposals for continued funding.  
The Committee feels that this part of the charge is contingent upon the
mechanism for delivery and will be the responsibility of the implementation
group.  The committee also feels that every attempt should be made to
recover the costs of the delivery.


III. Proposal ideas

We propose to develop a model that can be transferred to local library
groups, library schools, and individual institutions.  The modular approach
would allow participants to select areas of interests based on their needs.
 Further, the goal of the proposal is to allow for the widest possible
participation and should not be limited by geographic location.  The method
of implementation will attempt to satisfy both of these goals.

A. Content

We recommend including subjects from both modules.  

Module One would focus on Management Administration issues and would
include topics from the following list:

Explore where depository collections fall within the library organizational
structure.
How to work with other library departments and staff.
How to manage government electronic collections: processing, cataloging,
networking, collection development, and providing access.
Investigate issues in retraining document staff (public and technical
services staff)
How to comply with federal depository library program standards for
collection management in an electronic age.
How to effectively use listservs and internet resources to facilitate the
management of a documents collection.
How to effectively manage bibliographic control of government information
in your library or in your consortium in an electronic environment.


Module Two would focus on developing the advocacy skills of managers of
documents collections and would include topics from the following list:

How  to make connections with civic leaders.
How to promote government information to your library colleagues, library
administration, and the public.
How to write press releases and letters.
How to keep track of and call to action satisfied customers.


B. Possible Formats and Venues for delivery

We recommend that the Ad Hoc Committee be given the authority to further
investigate and enter partnerships with distance education technology
providers given the limits of the fund and with provisions for cost recovery.

on-line instruction (web based)
videotaped instruction 
electronic discussion groups
teleconferencing
preconferences
depository library conference