TLA GODORT Spring Meeting

04.11.07

TLA Annual Conference

San Antonio, TX

TLA GODORT BUSINESS MEETING: DRAFT MINUTES

DATE: April 11, 2007

RECORDER: Virginia Davis

Members present:

• Gay E. Carter, University of Houston Clear Lake
• Coby Condrey, Texas State Library & Archives Commission
• Virginia Davis, University of Houston O’Quinn Law Library
• John C. Hepner, Lone Star Documents Editor
• Starr Hoffman, UNT
• Clarice Luce, UNT
• Priscilla McIntosh, LexisNexis
• Annita R. Owens, TWU Program Committee Liason
• Victoria Packard, Texas A&M University, Kingsville
• David Rankin, TAMU Commerce
• Suzanne Sears, Tulsa City County Library
• Tom Rohrig, Texas Tech University Libraries

Guest:

• Yvonne, Chandler, University of North Texas SLIS - TLA Board Liason

Welcome and Introductions

The meeting was called to order by the presiding Chair, Victoria Packard, at 2:00 p.m.

Minutes

Minutes from the GODORT business meeting at the July 8, 2006 Annual Assembly were announced and approved.

Approval of Agenda

Victoria Packard presented the Business Meeting Agenda for today. Clarice Luce moved and John Hepner seconded approval of the agenda. The motion was approved unanimously.

TLA Board Member on support of Tall Texans

Yvonne Chandler, TLA Executive Board Member, and our Round Table’s liason to the Board: 1) encouraged our group to support heartily TLA Tall Texans. They now have a new place (no scorpions!) In the Hill Country (west of Austin, but not as far South) – 2) reminded us to check our group’s TLA Web page, and make sure that it is up to date – If not, e-mail Marianne Emerson – 3) The new Budget is due by May 15th – 4) Incoming Chair (Coby Condrey) will start dealing with the TLA Board after this meeting – 5) ??? There is a TLA Listserve distributed document – “FAQ: How to E-Mail TLA members & units” – 6) TLA Conference in 2008 will be in Dallas. Be sure to reserve a hotel room early! – You can do so at the Convention Center – 7) ??? Too much “light traffic” last year (complaint of Exhibitors) ???? – 8) “Men of TLA Calendar” is now available for purchase. All models will be present at the President’s Party this Friday night. They will be selling their photo + a copy of the calendar to TLA members for $5.00. – 9) Blogs: Currently there is a TLA “History” blog and a Conference blog – 10) Telecast is now totally electronic. Yvonne concluded by asking the audience if there were any questions for the Board. There were none.

Coby Condrey then proposed that our Round Table give Tall Texans a monetary donation. Two members from our group have attended Tall Texans in the past: Victoria Packard and Laura Baker. After some discussion, the group settled for $500.00 as the quantity. Coby motioned and Gay Carter seconded that we give a $500.00 donation to Tall Texans. The vote was called (by who??) And the motion passed unanimously.

Officer Reports

Vice/ChairChair/Elect (Coby Condrey) – 1) Coby presented to the group Anita Owens, our liason to next year’s TLA Conference. Anita introduced the theme for next year’s Conference: “Books, Bytes and Beyond” – a celebration of our diversity and our belief in the power of information. Anita is the contact person for anyone in our group that is planning a program for next year;s Conference. Your program should be complete 4 weeks before the TLA Annual Assembly in the Summer. Whenever possible, co-sponsor your program with other units, and put all your programs in priority order, because the Dallas Convention Center has limited space. June 15 is the deadline this year when everything has to be entered in. ???? New officers briefing ???? – Coby stated that as a follow up to these remarks, he will get on the listserv next week and work on this – his goal is to have a riveting government documents program for TLA 2008. – 2) Coby asked why did we change our Business Meeting for today (before Council??) — [Victoria?] said that the issue here was: shorten your program so that others can come to our program – Virginia Davis brought up that it would be most desirable for those that have limited backing from their institutions to schedule all programs and meetings sponsored by our Round Table on the same day or in 2 consecutive days of the conference. As it is this time, our Business Meeting is being held on Wed., but most of the programs are taking place on Friday. Some of us will be forced to make hard choices because of this arrangement. Yvonne Chandler suggested that when we request time for programming, we request a longer time period – that way we could add our Business Meeting then – John Hepner advised that we put notes on requests for programs and meetings stating that we want them to take place on the same day. Victoria Packard remarked that the computer drop-down menus have no writing space to add notes.

Secretary/Treasurer (Virginia Davis) – Virginia remarked that copies of the Treasurer’s Report brought up to March 31, 2007 and copies of the Minutes of our Round Table’s latest Business Meeting at the TLA Annual Assembly, Austin, TX, July 8, 2006, were available on the table near the entrance door to the room. She encouraged everyone to read these carefully and to submit additions/corrections to her if needed, either now, or in the next few weeks via e-mail to her. Virginia remarked that the Round Table has a positive and increased ending fund balance for this period.

Newsletter Editor (John Hepner) John reminded everyone to think seriously about contributing short articles, reports of meetings, etc. to our group’s Newsletter. For longer articles, TLA’s official journal has first pick, but if they do not use it, John will use it in our publication. It would be great if someone wants to summarize our program (or any other program at this Conference) for our newsletter. Coby asked : How is it decided if a submitted article goes to the TLA Journal? John stated that he usually is the person who makes that decision.

John’s e-mail has changed, as he is now retired from his librarian job duties,but he is still a Professor at the School of Library Science. His new e-mail is at our website, and will also be in the new TLA directory .

Webmaster (Bennett Claire Ponsford) Victoria Packard gave the report on behalf of Bennett Ponsford, who was not able to attend the meeting. We now have a “new” website in TLA thanks to Bennett. Also, Bennett sent an e-mail (??????) And got lost of responses.

Stacey Flower is the person who will be doing the Round Table’s blog.

Committee Reports

Awards Committee (Gay Carter) – Gay announced that this year we have an Award recipient: Coby Condrey. She stated that the Award will be given to Coby at the Round Table’s program on Friday. Gay invited everyone to come and honor Coby, a person richly deserving of such a distinction both for length and quality of service to TLA and to the government documents community.

Bylaws Committee (Bennett Ponsford) – Tom Rohrig spoke on behalf of Bennett, who was not able to come to the meeting. The Bylaws Committee has a report ready with proposed changes for the membership. This report will be e-mailed to the membership in the very near future. Tom will introduce this report later on in the Business Meeting for discussion.

Membership and Publicity Committee (Laura Baker) – Laura Baker was not able to attend the meeting. Gay Carter gave the following report on behalf of Laura: 1) There is no booth this year at the TLA Conference. The current booth materials were very dated, and our Round Table did not have handouts available for the membership. This made it very easy to fall into just having a FDLP only type of booth, something that our group wants to avoid. In view of all this, our Chair decided to cancel the Booth this year. However, the Committee is making plans for renewing our presence at next year’s annual conference in Dallas, via a Booth representing not only federal, but also state and local government materials.

John Hepner said that he really liked the frame that Gay has used in the past at the booth. Gay still has it. It would be great if something new could be done for the information that goes inside the frame. He gave an example of a poster project that he did recently using Adobe Acrobat that worked out real well. He would like for us to use our own logos in such a project. Gay remarked that we really need to expand our coverage at the booth to include materials for and about state and city document librarians. Victoria proposed sending out an e-mail to the membership to ask for input on a project for updating the way we present information at our Booth.

Nominating Committee (Tom Rohrig) – Tom passed out a ballot to vote for a new Councilor. There were 3 nominees : 1) Star Hoffman – 2) David Rankin – 3) ?????

New Business

Election Results – The ballot results were announced by Tom as follows: 1) David Rankin, will be our next Councilor – 2) Star Hoffman will be our next Alternate Councilor.

Discussion of Bylaws Committee handout with proposed changes to the Bylaws (Tom Rohrig) – The following Bylaws topics were brought up initially: 1) Article II (see underlined portions) – 2) Proposed changes to “Standing Rules”: a) Cosmetic changes – b) the adding of some duties to the office of Vice Chair and to the group’s Webmaster – c) Rule 3: Information there is sexpanded – d) Rule 5: New rule – e) Two additional proposals: i) Rule 6: 30 day notice for changes of our Standing Rules – ii) Rule 7: ???? --

The Bylaws Committee wants input from the membership – this document will also be e-mail to our Round Table in the near future.

Standing Rule 2d #3: Coby Condrey brought up “Standing Rule 2D #3 – He remarked that he soon will be a Past Chair of our Round Table, and he does not intend to join ALA (as required currently by this Rule). John Hepner stated that several ALA units did away with “affiliate status” several years ago. Coby stated that he is a member of the “Committee of 8" (Librarians from the Southwest area of the USA) ???? – Suzanne Sears remarked that it is important for us to know what goes on in ALA, but perhaps someone who is a member of both TLA and ALA would be more suitable to report interesting news from the ALA Conference and meetings. As past Chair of our Round Table, Gay Carter state that she could not recall ever doing anything about this while in office. John said that this may be something that should have been deleted from our Bylaws years ago. Tom concluded by saying that he would check this matter with the Bylaws Committee.

Rule 6 : Coby also brought up Rule 6. For this rule, he proposed that instead of using the word “liase” that we put in its place “coordinate”.

Election for Councillor: John brought up the election for Councillor: We need a minimum of 2 candidates, as TLA needs to have a Councillor and an Alternate Councillor. So usually, whoever gets the most votes in the election is declared to be the Councillor, and the person who gets the next highest number of votes becomes the Alternate Councillor.

Electronic Voting: Coby then introduced the topic of “electronic elections”. TLA wants this, but it precludes “nominations from the floor” and it is a wise saying that states: “the world is run by people who show up”.

John remarked that electronic balloting would change the whole procedure for our group, because all has to be decided by December 1st – thus the Nominations process cannot wait to just before the April Conference. John wants everyone to understand that the currrent and the proposed nominations process are mutually exclusive – and thus will require radically different deadlines. We really need to decide to do one or the other. John also mentioned that we should not nominate someone to be Chair of a Round Table or Division that has no history with that particular group – also, if we want to do electronic voting, it must first be voted in by the membership. The TLA Board is encouraging people to switch to electronic voting. A very good reason is that if we have this kind of voting, then those members of the group who cannot get to the Conference will have a chance to get involved with the voting. John brought up that if we do change to electronic voting, we will have to change our timetables for this group. Our Round Table’s Nominations Committee will end up by having only 2 months to get everything done, since all the pertinent information about voting is published in our group’s Fall Newsletter ( January) – and the ballot was out by Feb. 2????

Suzanne Sears asked if our group posts minutes and nominations at our website? The answer is “yes”. Yvonne proposed that we use our TLA listserve’s member distribution list to alleviate the concern that some persons will not be present, to let the membership know in advance what the Nominations Committee has come up with for nominations; and to ask if there are any more nominations for the upcoming elections. ???? Electronic balloting would go out in February (2/15). Also: Do we want to continue to vote at the Annual Conference? – Suzanne said that the list would have to be ready by October, and the final date would be December 1st, to publish it by January 5 (since TLA requires the results be in by then.

Rule 3A #2: Victoria brought up this rule. It is a challenge to have 2 nominations available for the officer positions in our group. She proposed that we change the wording to say: “will strive to nominate two for each position” – Ideally, one wants to have more than one person running for each officer’s position, but in reality, this is often very hard to achieve. Coby reminded the group that Standing Rules changes still need to be discussed????

Rule 3.B1: Yvonne remarked that if it is a close vote, then ballots are counted by hand. Coby asked what is the procedure to follow if there is an even number of votes for 2 candidates; perhaps the only solution here is to flip a coin. Yvonne added: What happens if there is a tie in an electronic voting situation?

Rule 5.1:b: brought up by Gay ???

Rule 6.A: Coby warned the group to stay away from “quorum numbers” anywhere in the rules.

Rule 7: Victoria brought up the “Standing Rules” ??? “distributed ???. Suzanne Sears suggested that for our Bylaws we may not want to go to electronic voting only. Remember: “Whoever shows up rules the world” – Yvonne thinks that it is possible to use electronic voting for Bylaws. The proposed changes could be published beforehand in our “Lone Star Documents” . The membership would be given notice there of all the proposed changes. John asked the group to be sure to see Article IX (Amendments to the Bylaws). Coby said that a 2/3 majority is required to change the Bylaws, but the Standing Rules we can change ourselves. Any proposed change to the Bylaws must first go to the TLA Bylaws Committee for approval request.

Coby then made a motion that Tom submit the Bylaws amendments approved today at this meeting to the TLA Bylaws Committee for approval. Gay seconded the motion. Victoria called for the vote. The motion passed unanimously.

Tom Rohrig asked for advise on how to submit the changes just voted-in to the TLA Bylaws Committee. Coby suggested that he takes seven copies of the revised Bylaws to the Committee’s next meeting. Another suggestion was to go to the TLA Business Office at the Conference and submit the “changes” approved. Tom stated that he will summarize all the changes.

Discussion of program ideas for the TLA 2008 Annual Conference (Coby Condrey) – Coby stated that he will work on this immediately after the Conference and post news on this topic electronically. ??? Victoria: Dilik?? Committee she is in may want to ????

The meeting was adjourned at 3:50 p.m.

(Do not have in my notes who motioned and seconded to finish the meeting)

Respectfully submitted by: Virginia Davis, Secretary/Treasurer.