2021-04-07 Steering Committee Meeting Minutes

Agenda and Minutes

April 7, 2021

 Attendees:

April Feldman (Communications Manager)

Allison Fischbach (Student Member)

Ryder Kouba (Education Coordinator)

Tori Maches (Chair)

Kiera Sullivan (Secretary)

Melissa Wertheimer (Vice-Chair)

Agenda items:

I.News/Questions/Announcements

A. Melissa shared her new blog post! 

B. April reminded us about writing our blog posts. Right now, she has a post lined up for April and for May.

1. Action: Kiera will do one for June (for June 16th post date) - submit to April by June 14th.

2. Action: Tori will do one for July (for July 21st post date) - submit to April by July 19th.

C. Ryder has accepted a new position! (Congratulations!) Librarian/Archivist at American Research Center in Jordan.

II.Old/Continuing Business

A. Future coffee chat (May/June) co-hosted with the Accessibility & Disability Section (Kiera)

1. Action: Kiera will send an initial invitation to Michelle Ganz (chair) on Monday April 12th.

B. Doodle poll for next planning meeting for joint section meeting with ERS. 

1. Action: Jenny would like our responses by end of day tomorrow

III.New Business

A. SAA update on scheduling section meetings in conjunction with the Annual Meeting (Tori)

1. Tori forwarded 2 emails with information about session planning. Recap:

a. Section meetings held throughout July. 90 minute time slots. Also offering 2-hour time slots for joint section meetings.

b. Zoom meeting accounts accommodating up to 1000 people.

c. Otter ai for live captioning.

d. Recordings will be made available.

e. Scheduler will be released Wednesday April 14th.

f. Want sections scheduled by May 7th.

2. We will chat about this more at our next meeting and at our joint planning meeting with ERS.

B. Preparing for section elections (Tori)

1. Felicia provided a guide for how to run an election. We need to be thinking about:

a. Student Member, Communications Manager, and Vice-Chair are up for election this year.

b. Call for candidates, including: brainstorming about kinds of things we’d like to do in the coming year, and skills and expertise that might help with that.

c. Contact anyone who may be interested in running.

d. Ballot info due by June 1^st

2. Our section’s elections guide is in the policy section of the SAA website. They want any proposed revisions to our standing rules by the end of April/start of May, as well.

a. Tori plans on creating an onboarding document including this sort of thing for future steering committee members.

i. Action: Tori will give an update on the onboarding document at our next meeting

b. Melissa asked how April’s onboarding experience went. Is 1 year in the position enough? Should we update the governance manual to a 2-year term?

1. April indicated that only brief instructions were given. The microsite is not really used much by our steering committee, so she really only needed to become familiar with the blog. Tori agreed that she did not have much onboarding, either.

2. April suggests creating guidelines for guest bloggers and creating a backlog of posts. She offered to help write up some information for future onboarding. She said if we want to do more with the microsite, expanding to a 2-year term would make sense. If it is going to continue to be mostly blog posts, 1 year is fine.

c. Tori proposed that we all think about what we’d like our committee to accomplish in the next year. 

1. Tori noted that the Vice-Chair spearheaded this call in past years, but this year the Steering Committee will share the responsibilities.

2. Action: All will brainstorm section priorities, activities, and initiatives during this month of April. We will also create a list of people we might like to contact about volunteering to run, but this is not necessarily required. This brainstorming will be done in this Google document.

Meeting was adjourned at 6:43 pm (EST).