System Coordinator and Consultant Meetings

I spent Thursday and Friday in Austin at the System Coordinator and System Consultant meetings. Here are some highlights:

Coordinator's Meeting:

- Deborah Littrell advised us to remind System members that the amount of local funding support needed for System membership went up in FY2007 and will continue to increment until 2015. If you do not meet this membership criteria, your library will be placed on probation. Your library will then have three years to make up the difference before losing System membership.

- Dr. Lwey Hing Jeng, director of TWU SLIS, spoke briefly on their new MLS program for small libraries. You can find more information here.

- Debra Gibson reminded all the coordinators about the NETLS Media Program. This program is a collection of public performing videos which can be checked out and shown at your library. NTRLS is paying the fee to allow all NTRLS member libraries to participate.

-External Funding Request Prior Approval forms were introduced. These forms will need to be filled out by Systems before pursuing any activities to raise external funds. NTRLS has already filled out one for adding fee-based services to ntrls.org.

-Wendy Clark went over the first draft of awards granted through the Loan Star Libraries program. The final grant awards will be announced in August. If you want to your listed award on the draft document, please let me know.

-Long Range Plans for 2010 and 2011 are due to TSLAC by February 1, 2008. NTRLS will be working closely with NTRLS staff, NTRLS Board of Directors and member libraries on constructing the plan. At the same time, NTRLS will also putting together a fresh five year plan for 2009 to 2013. TSLAC went over the firs preliminary draft of the long range plan guidelines.

Consultant's Meeting
At this meeting, each System shared what they had planned for 2008. TSLAC then shared their planned activities for 2008. Lots of neat workshops on the horizon all over the state. For more information, check out the CE portal. We also discussed the Plinkit program, which is a web hosting service that TSLAC is launching where libraries can create websites at no cost. If you are interested in participating in Plinkit, please contact Adam Beatty at the System office. It was also revealed that in 2008 there will be a Teen Reading Club along with the usual Summer Reading Club. Great Stuff.