2023-11-28 Executive Meeting Minutes

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Minutes
WAML Executive Board Meeting
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
9:00 am – 11:00 am PST / 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Call meeting to order: 12:02 pm EST

Officers in attendance: 

  • Jessica Benner (President)
  • Meg Miller (Vice President)
  • Kat Strickland (Past President)
  • Lena Denis (Secretary)
  • Bruce Godfrey (Treasurer)

Absent: 

Other attendees: Cheyenne Stradinger, Kevin Dyke, Ken Rockwell, Nick Beyelia

Approval of minutes from last meeting:

Officer Reports & Check-In

  • Jessica Benner (President)
    • Will present policies and procedures edits for approval probably by next meeting
    • Excited to hear about WAML 2024
    • Emailed Julie Sweetkind-Singer at Stanford about physical address and wants to discuss in January
  • Meg Miller (Vice President)
    • Will be discussing WAML 2024 updates shortly in agenda
  • Kat Strickland (Past President)
    • Started setting up a time to meet with Meg and Tom about the stolen maps
    • Composing an email about virtual map collection review with Janet Reyes, Chris Thiry, and Martin Chandler will discuss in old business
  • Lena Denis (Secretary)
  • Emailed Ryan Mattke about being a WAML-NGAC rep and he said yes!
  • Bruce Godfrey (Treasurer)
    • Took care of last action item here, migrated 2023 WAML to past conferences
    • Google doc listed below in old business

Actions approved over email by E-Board since September 2023 E-Board meeting

  • none

Appointed Position Reports

  • Sarah Zhang (Information Bulletin Editor)
  • Ilene Raynes (IB Book and Geospatial Resources Review Editor)
  • Georgia Brown (IB Features Editor)
  • Nick Beyelia (Membership Manager) – nothing to report
  • Mike Smith (New Mapping Editor)
  • Amy Work (Social Media Manager)
  • Zoe Dilles (WAML Archivist)
  • Kevin Dyke (Web Administrator) – nothing to report

Updates from task forces, committees, etc.

  • Continuing Education (Jon Jablonski) – no report
  • Communications Committee (Georgia Brown)
  • Had a meeting and took notes
  • Scholarship Committee (Jo-Ann Wong) – no report

Old Business

  • WAML 2023 (Jessica and Bruce)
  • Vacant positions: brainstorming how to fill these (All)
    • Geoscience Information Society (GSIS) (Chrissy stepping down)
      • Maybe advertise this liaison opening, along with NACIS and SLA liaisons and social media manager position, to the WAML listserv would be a good idea
      • ACTION: Jessica will send out a vacant positions advertisement email to WAML listserv about open positions – GSIS, NACIS, and SLA liaisons, and social media manager position
    • National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) – Yay! Ryan Mattke
      • ACTION: Lena will talk to Ryan about becoming a WAML member if he isn’t one already
    • Special Libraries Association, Geography and Map Section (SLA/G&M)
      • ACTION: Jessica will draft some language for us to check by email that her colleague at SLA can send out to the listserv to recruit a liaison there
    • Should we create one for North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS)? (Kat)
      • They used to have a liaison for WAML long ago
      • Kat moves to add NACIS to WAML liaison list and seek a liaison
        • Meg seconds
        • Motion passes
    • Continuing Education Committee Chair (Kat?)
      • Jon wanted to step down
      • Used to be their role to plan workshops for conferences, but the conference organizers have been doing that for a while now → idea to have them fill the gaps throughout the year of having virtual meetup workshops instead
      • Kat wants to work on the map collection review workshop anyway, so she thinks she may as well chair this for now, and the official charge of the committee should be rewritten
      • Jessica sees need to update the charge of other committees as well, so this may be a good idea to go over in January; she’s meeting with Georgia soon to look over a draft of what the communications committee charge should be
      • ACTION: Kat will work on a draft of the new charge for the continuing education committee, discuss it with Jessica, and see how the remaining committee people feel about it
    • ACTION: Jessica needs to send official letters to Zoe, Ryan, Sarah, and Joanne about accepting liaison and committee positions
  • Policies and Procedures (Jessica)
    • Most changes made here using Suggested Changes. eBoard, Please review and approve.
      • Still working on charge of the Communications Committee (5.1.c) & Google Group (9.1.b) sections. (Jessica will meet with Georgia and Meg respectively to discuss these)
    • The Google Doc is ‘the’ record. Need to update the website to mirror the Google Doc. 
    • Changes from Previous eBoards, last year’s eBoard, Appointed Positions task force, and a read through by Jessica for consistency of naming. 
    • ACTION: EVERYONE should read through the policies and procedures updates and see if there are any remaining issues – make a comment in the doc if you see anything so the policies and procedures can be approved by the Exec Board at next meeting and then circulated by Lena to the members; leave a comment at the top to say you approve if that’s all you have to say

New Business

  • WAML 2024 (Meg and Cheyenne)
    • Dates for in-person conference: September 25-28th
      • NACIS is mid-October and Albuquerque balloon fiesta is October 5-13
      • During this time frame hotels are about $150 per night
      • Still plan to record presentations done during this time for people to catch up on later
      • Some things should still be hybrid, namely the business meeting and sounding board
    • Would like to propose a virtual symposium on October 10th with virtual presenters (workshops welcome), poster presenters, scholarship winner reflection, highlights from 1-2 folks who attend the in-person side, and virtual trivia
      • Idea is that the in-person part is still focused on lightning talks, presentations, workshops, etc. but the virtual part can hold things that are often in the breaks like posters, or that can only be done virtually for certain presenters
      • Also gives time for scholarship winner to give reflection later on after general announcement that they’ve won
    • Will send save-the-dates out after the holidays
    • Feel free to comment on these notes or email Meg with further thoughts or questions! Meg and Cheyenne should let Exec Board know how we can support them, and will work on the budget proposal to be presented to us
    • Will be important to process recordings and publish them without a lag, which is the archivist’s responsibility
      • ACTION: Jessica will follow up with Zoe about the archivist’s role in processing and posting conference recordings
    • PROPOSED by Jessica: approve this conference timeline for 2024
      • Kat seconds
      • All in favor
      • APPROVED
    • WAML Distinguished Service Award – did we forget it? (Kat)
      • Might be nice to make a page for it on the website to show who’s won this in the past, and to bring it back for 2024? (not required for every year)
      • ACTION: Kat will put a list together of past distinguished service award winners to review in January, and we can discuss potential 2024 candidates then
  • Membership (Kevin and Nick)
    • What is the state of the membership? (Nick)
      • Membership is slightly down but not the worst
      • Currently at 62 members and 12 lifetime members
      • Some people still pay by mailed check (6 this year, with 1 being a lifetime)
      • Nick has noticed that some people pay twice and he’s not sure how to reconcile that e.g. dealing with refunds, relates to follow bullet point about the fact that people tend to forget if they’ve already paid and have no way to check, so they do it again
    • How can the eBoard help boost membership?
    • Can we have a member space on the website so people can look up when their membership expires? (Kevin and Nick)
      • Currently it’s a bottleneck for Nick to have to respond when people ask
      • Also an issue that people tend to use different emails from year to year when renewing, so Kevin and Nick have to de-duplicate
      • Related issue that people forget how to log in and check things – Kevin worked on something this summer to consolidate WordPress user roles so it would be easier to administer this side of things
      • Kevin intends to gather a list of current and expired accounts to fix the list, and also wants to create some easily comprehensible language for the website to show people how to log in and check their membership status
      • Has added a recurring subscription option so people can auto-renew! Still need to test it, Jessica volunteers to help – will need to take a look at how hard this is to change later if membership rates change
      • Longer-term idea after list cleanup is done is to have a membership directory
      • Suggestion to send people a less ambiguous receipt than the Paypal one to make it easier to check membership details and present them to administrators, etc.
      • Could be worth having people list more than one email with their user profile, since a lot of people communicate with their professional emails but use services like Paypal with a personal email
      • Will have to consider privacy issues if we want to do a member directory
      • Possible that Kevin will make a budget request related to a website add-on that makes exporting member data easier and can generate reports – will bring it to the board
      • Kevin will also talk to the communications committee folks at next meeting about helping with drafting language and accessing website as makes sense to help with the workload
      • The membership login page on the website would be a good place to have instructions about how to log in, check membership status, etc.
      • Might be good to spin up an ad hoc committee to help Kevin once he gets a task list together, which he’ll do between now and early in the new year → Jessica suggests Kevin and Nick meet between now and the new year to get a list together of what needs to be done regarding member lists, website updates, etc. and Jessica is happy to coordinate
        • ACTION: Jessica will set up a meeting with Nick and Kevin to talk about membership list and relevant web area cleanup plan
    • Have we sent a recent list of members to the WAML Archivist? (Nick)
      • Nick will send the previous two years’ lists to Zoe and the newest will be sent after cleanup
      • General question about how and for how long to embargo membership information and how much to keep in the first place (names and institutions, email as well, etc.)
        • ACTION: Jessica will talk to Zoe about looking up what the rules are for how to hold on to membership information in the archive in a way that’s useful but doesn’t violate any privacy laws or norms
    • Any update on the listserv migration? Barriers? Next steps?
      • Meg has been working on testing this, needs a CSV of names and emails to get the listserv set up and permissions correct
      • Estimates about 2-3 hours of work left to do before this can be finished in terms of the email listserv
      • Still need to discuss how to host the archived WAML messages that are currently discoverable from the UW side – talk to Evan about this
        • ACTION: Meg will talk to Evan about archiving the messages of the old listserv
  • California Travel Law (Bruce)
    •  A WAML member emailed to inform the board:  California recently repealed its law that prevented us Californians from getting funds for trips to Idaho and other states.  So we would once again be able to get reimbursed if the conference were held in Idaho.  
    • Idaho can be a 2025 host!
    • Craig from Denver Public Library is also interested in hosting, maybe could do 2026

Potential Social Media Announcements

  • “Santa’s got a gun” images from Chris?
  • Matt Toro’s library images
  • ACTION: Kat will send social media suggestions to Amy

Next Meeting

  • Is very close to Christmas – move it? Or just cancel since that’s only 3 weeks from today? Lena will go ahead and send the poll to get January and spring semester meetings scheduled
    • Agreed to cancel December meeting and have next meeting early in January
  • Plan for future meetings (Jessica)
    • December via email: Finalize Indexer costs
      • Update: do this by email and discuss at early January meeting
    • January: Discuss plan for the Stolen Maps (with Tom), Nomination committee, WAML Physical address
    • February or March: have committee reports 

Meeting adjourned: 1:37 pm EST

Minutes submitted by Lena Denis (Secretary).

Approved by the Executive Board by email on December 8, 2023

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