Tag: boston

My Values Workshop for LLAMA’s Career Institute at ALA in Boston

Posted on by jessamyn

What Matters? A Workshop for Developing & Articulating Our Values

I went to ALA for the first time in several years last week. I don’t think I’ve been to ALA since the Think Tank has been in existence. It was a great setup. Conference was in Boston. I was giving a pre-conference. Part of my deal was that I’d get registration for the conference, and one night in a fancy hotel (and some $). It worked out great. Usually, I admit, I dislike workshops. I don’t like to be in them and I barely know how to give them. However, my feelings on this are not normative, so I tried to bring my education and my experience to an afternoon workshop for about twenty people and have some useful exercises and activities as well as some good discussion. I think it went well. My main self-critique was that I had made sure I had three hours of “stuff” for a three hour workshop and maybe didn’t leave enough time for people to just talk to each other. More blank spaces next time. You can read through my slides as well as see the handouts and exercises (and the image credits) at this URL: https://www.librarian.net/talks/llama16/.

ALA had a conference app that encouraged you to upload your slides to the application so people could have them. Great idea in theory, but in reality I didn’t see any privacy policy and was a little leery of giving up my content so I uploaded a single slide with the URL to my actual slides. Hope people didn’t feel that it was too cheeky. A few other photos of my ALA trip are here. Thanks so much to everyone who came to the pre-conference and especially to LLAMA who invited me and took very good care of me. They were a joy to work with.

Fishy behavior with trust money at BPL

Posted on by jessamyn

So after Bernie Margolis has his contract “un-renewed” the mayor of Boston is looking at seizing control of the moneys that make up the Boston Public Library’s trusts. This means that to spend money from the BPL trusts, the library has to get approval for each specific expenditure from City Hall. Margolis, still at work and annoyed at his ouster has ordered his staff to not send overdue fines collected to the city as was the usual procedure. It’s not totally clear from the article what the ordering of events is. At least one donor is thinking of asking for her money back.

Under current practice, the library trustees approve formation of the trust funds and transfer custody of the funds to City Hall. City Hall then forwards trust proceeds – dividends and other returns on investments – in a lump sum annually to the library.

Library trustees decide what to spend the money on, in accordance with donors’ instructions, and library staff members cut the checks. Library staff members also reconcile the books and file annual reports and tax returns for the board of trustees, which is operated as an independent, nonprofit corporation.

Signori, the city’s collector-treasurer, said her office will no longer be giving the library lump sums. Instead, she said, the trustees will now have to submit invoices to City Hall for processing and payment. If Signori or her staff members believe the expenses do not match donors’ intent or if there is another problem, she says she will raise an issue with trustees.

[thanks kate]

See you at PLA?

Posted on by jessamyn

I will be blogging for PLA as a regular old PLA blogger and hopefully doing some updates here on my own time. Anyone who will be in Boston Tues-Sun [if you live there, or especially if you’re just visiting] please look me up. I’m going to the conference in Boston but staying with my sister in Somerville. Unlike most conferences, I’m not overcommitted, so let’s get together.