submitted by Jessica Trujillo, an ALSC-sponsored ALA 2008 Emerging Leader
Hello all. It’s me again. My Emerging Leader Group D has been busy as bees creating a survey to see how ALSC improves the lives of its members (because it does, doesn’t it?). The purpose of the survey is “to determine how ALSC can help potential, present, and past members.”
While the survey is only 13 questions long, it took us quite a while to finish it. Since we are all spread throughout the country (New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Delaware, and California), we have to work remotely. This situation –for me at least– creates a problem. It reduces the guilt factor if I am not getting things done on time. I still feel guilty for not doing my work on time, but someone giving me the sad eye really puts me over the edge guilt-wise. Also, librarians lead very active lives, and we work in very germy conditions. So, between our regular jobs, vacations, life changes, and illnesses, it is quite hard to get things done.
Since we all live in far flung parts of the US, we have been using Google Docs to do our work. While I feel a bit worried about contributing further to the omnipresent domination of Google on society, Google Docs is really useful in group work. It saves us from downloading various versions of the same document or confusing the different versions and other such mishaps. Sharing is immediate and we all work on the same document. Very cool.
We will use our results to make our recommendations to ALSC in how to attract new members and keep current ones. So help us to help you by taking our survey. As I write this, we have 355 responses (thank you all) which is FANTASTIC, but I know there are many many more ALSC members out there who have yet to participate. If you are an ALSC member but have not received a link to the survey and would like to take it, please email Jenny Najduch with your info at:jnajduch@ala.org. Cheers!