NHLA Executive Board Meeting

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

2:00 – 4:00 pm

New Hampshire Municipal Association, Concord, NH

Call to order: 2:05

Attending: Mary White, Ann Hoey, Amy Lappin, Carlos Pearman, Deann Hunter, Ed Moran, Jessica Dronin, Kristen Paradise, Mary Cronin, Eileen Gilbert, Cara Barlow, Marilyn Borgendale, Jenn Hosking, Amy Lapointe, Denise van Zanten, Randy Brough, Marina Hale, Sarah Leonardi, Mike York.

The minutes from August 11, 2015 meeting were approved with edits.

REPORTS:

President’s Report / Jenn Hosking:

  • The joint NHLA/NELA conference in October was a success. NHLA did a great job presenting the local flavor by hosting a well-attended Dine Around as well as organizing some highly attended programs. The Meet and Greet hosted by the Advocacy Committee and YALS was more popular than expected and proved to be a great kick off for the NHLA raffle which raised $1,030.
  • The annual business meeting was held at the conference on Tuesday, October 27th. There was not a quorum so the minutes for the 2014 and 2015 meeting will need to be approved next year. Election results were announced. Welcome to all new Board members.
  • Due to the proximity of the ALA Midwinter conference in Boston, as the NH state chapter leader, I was awarded complimentary registration. I plan to attend a forum for chapter leaders in addition to hearing some great speakers.
  • Looking forward to 2016 I hope we can work to increase active participation in NHLA and its Board. We have a few vacant positions to fill.

Past President’s Report / Amy Lapointe:

  • Thank you to all who participated in the NHLA/NELA conference planning, volunteered at the NHLA table, and contributed to the raffle basket. NH had a strong presence and I heard from many happy attendees.
  • Welcome to our new Board members. Please confirm contact information is correct on the website.

Treasurer’s Report / Cara Barlow:

  • Cara distributed copies of NHLA’s November 2015 Profit & Loss Statement and the Balance Sheet. There are two issues she pointed out on the balance sheet, which she has numbered to make them easier to find:

(1) If you look at the circled 1 on the balance sheet you’ll see a 100 instead of 0. This is a clerical error I made. I mistakenly created two records for a check – one in which I printed the check, the other having a status of “to print.” When I realized what I’d done I deleted one of the records, and unfortunately it was the record of the real check. When Brenda ran the reconciliation, she saw the “to print” status of the remaining check, and deleted it. We didn’t realize this happened until Brenda ran the reconciliation. This is a fixable problem that we’re working on. Be assured that the $100 check was created and mailed to the correct person, but we need to work on correcting the QuickBook account.

(2) If you look at the circled 2 on the balance sheet you’ll see -1000 instead of a 0. Again, this was a mistake on my part that came to light during the reconciliation. A $1000 check was created and sent to a Norris Scholarship recipient. There was over $5,000 in the checking account at the time I created and signed the check, so I thought I didn’t need to transfer money into the checking account. Any time I write a check from a restricted fund I need to transfer that amount from the NHLA savings to the NHLA checking. I transferred the money yesterday, so it will show up in the December reconciliation.

  • NHLA’s total assets as of November 30, 2015 were $136,758.21 Our books are in order other than the two issues Cara pointed out, and everything is proceeding smoothly.
  • Annual Financial Review (FY15)

Our Annual Financial Review, taxes and NH Corporate Report done by Plodzick & Sanderson have been satisfactorily completed and submitted.

  • Annual Treasurer Training

Cara is offering the annual training for new treasurers and others on Thursday, Dec. 10 at 2:00pm. The training will be offered via Skype.

NEW BUSINESS:

  • 2016 Meeting schedule: 2/9, 4/12, 6/14, 8/9, 10/11, 12/13 @2pm
  • Request for funding: Jenn asked for funds to attend the ALA Midwinter Chapter Leaders Forum in Boston ($75).This motion was approved.
  • Request to donate extra funding from conference Meet and Greet to NELA (Cara Barlow). Some vendors donated more than we used and there is $117 left over which Cara and Mary Cronin recommend we retain for advocacy committee’s future projects. Motion to move $117 from NHLA fall conference income to Advocacy Committee. Approved.
  • Conference committee openings –spring 2017: Jenn reported that we need to start the planning process, find committee members, and select a location. Jenn will Contact NELLS participants and reach out to others. We also need to plan the budget for this endeavor.
  • Proposal to eliminate the NH State Library Advisory Council position: Mike York confirmed that this committee does not exist anymore, so recommends we eliminate this. Since this committee is written in the consitution and/or by-laws, these will be adjusted by Carlos Pearman.
  • Amy Lapointe reported that Dick Cote from the “Good Life Expo” is interested in having NHLA play a role in the conference. We could possibly have an NHLA board member on their planning committee. Mary Cronin will contact him to find out his timeline and ask her Advocacy Committee if they can help. Denise van Zantensaid they had a big conference and this looks like it's doubling in size. She would be willing to have a table there (free, ideally).
  • Amy Lapointe reported that Scott Green (a past state representative and a past member of State Library Advisory Council) would like NHLA to co-sponsor a presidential candidate’s forum.Mike York reported that Mr. Green is not as enthusiastic as he once was. The general concensus was that this is out of our league, with many of levels to go through and much too difficult to pull off. Mike will report back to Mr. Green that the board does not believe that this is realistic for our organization.
  • Budget 2016:We will begin discussions at our February meeting, once we have decided about the spring 2017 conference. Mary Cronin asked about video conferencing options for board meetings sothat some participants don't have to travel so far, such as Go-To-Meeting or Join Me, through TechSoup. There had been some technical hiccups from NELA's experience and it’s best if headphones are used. Marilyn will look into it. Cara reported that speaker about Customer Service (from NH Technical College) might be able to develop a version for libraries and we could use continuing education funds for this. Cara will talk with Barbara Prince.

OLD BUSINESS:

Joint membership with NELA / Linda Taggart: NHLA will offer extended membership with NELA for $20 ($15 for students) for 2016. Emails are being sent to current and lapsed members. The biggest change is that this will be for the calendar year for NELA. LInda is updating Wild Apricot site to remove old paper form for membership renewals.

Legislation / Randy Brough: Randy distributed three handouts about current bills. Ed Moran (NHLTA) reported that NHLTA will take a position and it would be good tohave NHLA have a common front with them. This needs more research and discussion. We will get some updates from our lobbyist, Bob Dunn, and we will then decide what position we want Bob to take for us. The hearings will most likely be in January.

GUEST: Bob Dunn / NHLA lobbyist: Bobrepresents 12-15 various clients (nursing homes, Chambers of Commerce, etc.) including NHLA. When representing a client, there are 700-1,000 pieces of legislation (bills, not amendments) each year and he reads every one. If anything is of potential interest, he places it onto a spreadsheet. As the session goes on and bills get amended, he also keeps track of the amendments from viewing Senate and House calendars. Example: Vans issue was an amendment, not a bill. His job is to read all bills and calendars for amendments and to be on top of all that impacts us. Randy and he will talk and get a sense if NHLA wants to take a position on something. If yes, they talk about strategies to best advance NHLA's position either by talking to right people or by bringing people to a hearing. On the vans issue, Bob and Randy met with the Chair of committee. It’s important that this be a team effort especially since Bob might not know the real impact so it helps to talk with Randy. Things vary from session to session. Bob was an assistant AG and he represented Commission of Libraries and Arts. Question: What about employment and labor law, volunteers, trustees? Bob searches as broadly as we wish. We would be the ones to define what he looks for since we are the client. This can be labor-intensive because, as noted, he reads all bills and amendments. One can't simply do a keyword search since it might not catch everything. Regarding the current Bill 1401, Randy will talk with small group of NHLA board members to determine what to do next (we like to be on same page with NHLTA) and then Randy will tell Bob what we want done at hearing. The representatives decide if a bill gets killed or advances on to the full house. There are 400 representatives in the house and 24 in the senate. It’s important to note that one-third of this group changes every two years. Bob knows who the key people are. Question: Is it more effective for librarians to contact reps or for Bob to contact? The constituents should contact their reps – the reps see Bob every day and he's not a constituent – theconstitutents are the gold standard. It's easy for the reps to say no to Bob, but not so easy for the reps to say no to us. Clients should be in the forefront. Question: How many times a full-court press for NHLA? Bob talked with the key person when they were doing away with the arts council and moving state library to another department, NHLA stood up. Lori Fisher testified. Regarding the current TOR bill,does it do anything for confidentiality of library records act? The entire purpose of TOR is that it’s impossible to know who. Does this inhibit law enforcement completely? One problem with the TOR bill is it is unclear what it's trying to do – the last sentence reads "providing written notice to the person in question" and this is impossible so this needs much more discussion as to how this would work on the ground. The people who wrote this bill aren't thinking it through. Mike York commented that we shouldn’t change legislation that we have unless there is a very good reason to do so. Bob: Traditionally we have cast the search net pretty specifically for NHLA. Question: If we cast a wider net, will that increase our annual fees? Bob will check on that but we might not want to cast too wide a net since it is difficult to follow it all. Question: Should we share our annual cost with NHLTA? Question: Can we do this research ourselves and only come to Bob when there's an issue? You could do on an ad-hoc basis but we could lose the daily contact with legislators and you never know what will crop up there. We would need to do the detailed review of the calendar and bills on our own, we would have to think about if the benefit is worth the price and that’s a balancing act. One can't put a dollar amount on the connections with the legislators, consider this similar to an insurance policy.

SECTION REPORTS:

● Academic / Karin Heffernan:

  • Karen could not attend because she was taking a tour/workshop of the Innovation Lab & Makerspace at SNHU with 2 librarians from Proctor Academy which is trying to set up a Makerspace Two librarians from SNHU presented at the recent NELA conference about these tools and libraries providing these for public use.
  • Karen is arranging a meeting with the NH state rep of ACRL-New England to see where a state library association academics section can fill in blanks not supplied by ACRL-NEC for academic librarians in NH. She is still trying to get a committee together to examine ways that academic libraries and public libraries might collaborate for their mutual benefit. She has tried to find leadership for this and for the section, but is not succeeding so she will most likely spearhead it and then see who might emerge to lead it.

● CHILIS / Kristen Paradise:

  • NELA – It seemed to work well putting the focus on attending NELA rather than hosting our own conference this past fall. We may do this again in the future but we do intend to continue with hosting our own fall conferences as well.
  • CHILIS Committees- We are making an effort to streamline financial practices.
  • 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten-Canvas bags have been distributed. We are excited to see how implementation goes. Idea sharing about engaging patrons in this early literacy initiative will be a focus of the CHILIS Spring Conference, which will be held on Thursday, March 17, 2016 at SNHU. It will also feature the Kids, Books and the Arts showcase.
  • Children’s Librarian of the Year –We are accepting nominations through January 28th.
  • Feature a librarian-We are planning on selecting one Children’s Services worker a month and highlighting them and their library on Facebook. We are hoping to generate interest and let people know what’s going on around the state.
  • Facebook Posts- we are looking for fun, innovative and informative posts for the CHILIS Facebook Page. If you or your library has something you would like to contribute, please send it to Liz Gotauco: or Nicole Giroux: .

● ITS / Lara Croft: No report.

PARALIBRARIANS / Eileen Gilbert:

  • Paralibrarian representatives have visited two more co-ops to discuss the Paralibrarian Certification process. Two more visits are scheduled by March. The feedback we receive in this process goes into making the certification procedure simpler and more inclusive.
  • The section sponsored a number of classes in various locations this fall. In September, Ann Hoey led a repeat Children’s Collection Management session in the North Country. Amanda Reynolds Cooper taught a Library Management class in October at Hooksett. Michael Sullivan did a two session Children’s Services class in November at Kingston, and of course, he wrote the book on the subject. Mary Danko is leading a session on Lively Library Programming this month. We are always interested in suggestions for topics and volunteer teachers.
  • The next Paralibrarian board meeting is January 8 at 10am in Hooksett, weather permitting.

● READS / Rebecca Crockett: No report.

● URBANS / Randy Brough: Meeting Friday, December 11, in Manchester.

● YALS / Gail Zachariah:

  • YALS met on November 19. New officers were elected. Danny Lykansion of Rodgers Memorial Library is Vice President and Liz Gotauco of Merrimack Public Library will continue as secretary. Barb Ballou of Whipple Free Library will become past president and will take over as the webmaster as well.
  • We began to plan our next conference, which will be September 22, 2016. We do not have a location yet, but we will have a panel of librarians from various size libraries talk about programming. The conference will also include an author visit.

LIAISON REPORTS:

● Advocacy / Mary Cronin:

  • The Advocacy Committee met on September 17 and on November 12, 2015. Activity since last report:
  • NHLA/NELA conference Icebreaker, October 25

Advocacy Committee and YALS cosponsored this event. Funding for food was secured by Bernie Prochnik and Bobbi Slossar from vendor donations, prizes for drawing were secured by Bobbi and Christine Friese, with Flume nominee books donated by YALS. This event featured a free drawing with a number of book prizes plus a Kindle paperwhite, an announcement of YALS’ Flume Award, free food, and a cash bar. We passed out handouts inviting people to our Nov. 7 Librarians After Hours event. Wrap-up: great turnout, good location, we could have used a microphone/PA system. Food ran out quickly.

  • Regional librarian meetups

Advocacy Committee planned and hosted its first “Librarians After Hours” on Nov. 7 at Coat-of-Arms Pub in Portsmouth. 12-14 people came, a good mix of librarians and “civilian” partners. It was good to hear stories being shared, and meeting other librarians and putting faces with names we only know from NHAIS-L. Advocacy Committee feels these activities will go a long way to helping NH librarians connect with each other, build trust, share good ideas, collaborate, and spread the word about what libraries and librarians do. The next event will take place at the Holy Grail in Laconia from 4 to 6 pm on Saturday, Dec. 12. Randy Brough at Laconia Public Library offered to have librarians meet at the library at 3:45 pm, to park, take a library tour, then head over to Holy Grail together. A January event is tentatively planned to take place in Concord after NHLA-ITS’s event on Jan. 23 or 30.