Talking to each other is a good thing

The past six weeks have been some of the most hectic and emotionally tumultuous of any similar stretch of time that I can remember.  Lots of travel, deeply painful personnel issues to confront at work, Josie's daddy entering the picture, a week's site visit from my NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellow, Memphis 3: Return of the Pigs, and much more.  It's been a time of very low lows, but also some wonderfully high highs.

In the latter camp I put the third meeting of the Chicago Collaborative, which took place on April 8th.  The common consensus afterwards was that this was the best of the three, and given how good those first two were, that's a pretty high standard.

Much of our discussion had to do with upcoming programming and what we can do to develop concrete activities that will help bring our vision to a reality.  There will be an introductory and Q&A session at the MLA meeting on May 19 in Hawai'i, and a similar one at the NASIG meeting in June.  We've put together a proposal for a symposium that will be held at MLA 2010 in DC if it's approved by the CE Committee.  And it's on my list to put in a proposal for this year's Charleston Conference.

I'm particularly pleased with the Statement of Purpose that we developed immediately after the meeting.  While the press release and the framework document on the website provide more detailed background on how the Collaborative came to be, the Statement of Purpose tries to succinctly describe the vision.  I think it works pretty well.

We're hoping that the upcoming sessions will be a step towards broadening the conversations.  We've already scheduled our next meeting for November, and one of the things on the agenda for that meeting will be governance and how we more formally involve other organizations that may have an interest.  Since we're still in our baby steps (I tend to refer to the CC as an "unorganization"), we're a little unsure of exactly how we'll proceed with that, but we do know that in order to achieve our goals we've got to figure out ways to involve the broadest possible range of voices.  Given the energy and determination at this last meeting, I think we'll get there.

Comments

[Marcus Banks]

Great to see the Chicago Collaborative blossoming! There's definitely a need to move past polarization and towards consensus in the schol comm arena.

That said, I'm a little worried that too big a tent will lead to mushy outcomes. This is nothing against the Collaborative ...just seems to be the case that consensus statements are often bland and uninteresting (look at what usually results from G-7 or G-20 international conferences.) I hope that the Chicago Collaborative actually leads to concrete actions and projects, without succumbing to "paralysis by analysis."

[T Scott]

One of the things that I've been most pleased about is the focus on getting concrete stuff done. Much of the discussion has centered around practical programs -- we recognize that there's a lot about libraries (budgets, organizations, priorities) that publishers don't know much about, and a whole lot about the economics and practicalities of publishing that librarians don't know enough about, so we're working on developing modular programs that can be presented at different meetings to help address that. Similarly, we've quickly come to agreement that plagiarism and other forms of publishing misconduct are a concern that we both share -- many of the publishing groups have developed educational programs that they present at their conferences. Many librarians are seeing a strong focus on these issues on their campuses. So are there ways that we can join forces to bring these programs to venues where they'll have wide impact? That kind of thing.