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