Dear MLA Readers,
This is likely to be my last brief missive as MLA President, and it is an opportune moment to point out that there is very little that the President does on their own without the decision-making body that is the board of directors and the voting membership. One example of this is our recently approved initiative to subsidize conference registrations, which grew out of numerous requests voiced during the recent strategic planning process (by many of you). The board readily approved the idea, and a team, led by our Development Officer, Sara White, Lindsay Hansen Brown, former Development Officer (and coordinator of the Emergency Relief Subgroup), Web Manager Karen Berry McCool, and CFO Elizabeth Hille Cribbs, designed and launched a fundraising campaign. Please consider supporting registrants by donating to this worthy fund:
https://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/page/GeneralConferenceRegistrationFund
The MLA board recently also approved a donation of $1,000 from our Neil Ratliff (outreach) fund to support the SUCHO Equipment Fund (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online), toward digitizing and preserving endangered cultural heritage in Ukrainian libraries, archives, and museums. We thank our colleague Anna Kijas, who serves on the SUCHO administrative team, for bringing this effort to our attention and giving us an opportunity to support this war-torn region.
Election results: As announced on MLA-L we have new board members who will rotate into service in March, at the end of MLA/TLA conference. They are:
Houman Behzadi, Member-at-Large (2023-25) – Assistant Planning Officer
Rahni Kennedy, Member-at-Large (2023-25) – Assistant Fiscal Officer
Angela Pratesi, Member-at-Large (2023-25) – Assistant Parliamentarian
Blaine Brubaker, Student/Early-Career Representative (2023-25, now a permanent voting/elected position).
MLA/TLA Annual Meeting, 2023: I am eagerly anticipating our joint annual meeting (this year with Theatre Library Association) in Saint Louis. You may have noticed a New Business Town Hall scheduled for March 4, in the afternoon at 3 pm Central, preceding a coffee break and the membership business meeting. There are several reasons for this new session: in the last few years, members have brought new business forward during the business meeting and the time we had allotted was not nearly lengthy enough to accommodate business without going into overtime. We want to keep the early evening business meeting to a reasonable length and we also want to reduce the barriers that Roberts’ Rules of Order can pose, and to provide enough time to carefully consider issues raised by our members. We’ll share meeting best practices (ground rules) in Sched. These will be less rigorous than RRO but structured, equitable, and inclusive (as is always our aspiration).
In the service of a well-considered, productive, and thoughtful meeting, please send items of new business by February 15 (to me, at lizavick [at] upenn.edu).
It has truly been a career highlight and tremendous honor to serve you as MLA’s President. The job is challenging and gratifying. To modify the movie title, “Meet Me in St. Louis” for the grand gathering of music and theatre librarians.
Sincerely,
Liza Vick, President