AISTI Annual Report 2000

2000 Letter from the Chair

It is a pleasure to report on what has been the most exiting year in the history of the Alliance so far. The year was marked but not one but many milestones. The most obvious was the change of name from Library Services Alliance of New Mexico to a name that reflects the distributed and international scope that our group has achieved as the Alliance for Innovation in Science and Technology Information. AISTI may yet become a name to be reckoned with in an area where there are few organizations with a similar depth and focus.

Other milestones can be grouped into three development areas:

Publicity and Recruitment: A new publicity brochure was developed that spell out the benefits of membership more clearly. It also showcases our achievements better. A successful mini-conference in conjunction with the annual general meeting allowed us to show what we do and share what we know with potential new members. Both resulted in more organizations joining the Alliance. We were also able to share the honors received by member organizations as will be seen in the annual report.

Organizational Learning and Trend Analysis: The above mentioned mini-conference also allowed us to hear from industry leaders about new concepts in information management and maximizing new venture impact (see the Agenda [HOT LINK] for the mini-conference for more information). Our regular board meetings continued to be stimulating and members appreciate the opportunity to think out of the box and speculate on future digital library developments.

Improved Organizational Business Processes: This has been a personal goal for me. As Chair of the Alliance for three out of the last four years, it became clear that the work of the Chair and Treasurer would become too onerous if we do not take the risk to professionalize organizational management. I appreciate the support of the Board to do so. It has been a very difficult process but at year ‘s end, I believe we are positioned to continue this process to a point where executive officers will be freed up from the increasingly heavy duties of managing a growing organization to focussing mainly on leadership and developmental issues. What have we done? With the retirement of Karen Stoll, the administrative assistant, we decided to hire our first Executive Director, Corinne Machado. We also hired an accountant. The latter was a difficult process as our records were incomplete as is common in many volunteer organizations and some income tax information was unavailable for several years. Due to the hard work of Karen Stoll, Sally Landenberger, and recently, Corinne, they were able to create a system that should result in a favorable decision from the IRS’ Final Determination Review of our tax-exempt status in March 2001.

The development and approval of a business plan added to this professionalization process.

The addition of products and services continued apace as can be seen from the Annual Report. Once again we counted ourselves lucky to have an organization such as the Los Alamos “Library without Walls” as a member. Several new products under development were demonstrated to members and the cross-database search capability (FlashPoint®) was deployed for members with the required set of databases. Our negotiations for some products departed from previous practice by including non-Alliance members to the benefit of the larger group by providing a larger economy-of-scale. We realize that in the evolving consortial climate such joint ventures and temporary clusters add flexibility to our efforts. More member organizations offered to help with negotiations, thus lightening the load of the traditional negotiatprs and adding new expertize to out negotiations. Of particular note is the excellent work of Donnie Curtis (University of Nevada at Reno) and Chris Sugnet (UN Las Vegas).

As mentioned above, Karen Stoll, who has provided contract services to the Alliance for the past 7 years, decided to retire as of December 2000. She has seen the Alliance grow from a local organization to what it is today and has actively assisted this growth. Her advice in planning for the future management of the organization was invaluable. I have personally enjoyed knowing her for the past 5 years and appreciate her work for the Alliance, as I know all the other members do also. We thank her sincerely and wish her all the best for a long and happy retirement.

Finally, I believe that the Alliance is a unique organization with an exiting future. It is now on sound footing and rapidly reinventing itself. Corinne is the right person to assist us on this new path and Sally the right Chair to lead us. I thank the Board for their help in the past year and for the opportunity to serve at such an exiting time.

Johann van Reenen

Chairman, AISTI

January 2001