Lurching Toward Transparency

At yesterday's MLA Board of Director's meeting, Mark presented his update on his presidential priorities.   The essence of his presidential theme ("Only Connect") has been to encourage the association to make more use of the new communication technologies to create a more vibrant, more transparent organization that more effectively embraces all of the association's members.  We're not close to where we'd like to be yet, but we've made substantial progress in the past year.   Blogs & wikis are proliferating throughout the association's units.  The plenary session on Wednesday will be webcast live.  There are ten official conference bloggers who are having their wifi paid by the association. 

Most important for the long run, the Board of Directors and the Headquarters staff are solidly behind these efforts.   Mark has done a superb job during his presidential year of inspiring all of us to be more experimental, to stop worrying about getting it "right", and to try to foster a spirit of innovation in our association and in our own libraries.

The pace starts picking up today.  The board meeting starts up in another hour.  At 5:00 I'll go to the NLM/AAHSL Fellows & Mentors reunion, and after that I've got a three hour credentialing committee meeting.  I don't expect to get much rest between now and next Friday.

But it's great, as always, to be in Chicago.  I stopped at Andy's on Wednesday evening to hear some excellent music, and walked over to the Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday morning for an hour browsing some of the highlights of their permanent collection.  To my delight I found that they were also featuring one of William Kentridge's classic films.  An hour or two in a great museum is just the thing I need to store up energy for the week to come.