2024-01-08 Executive Meeting Minutes

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Minutes
WAML Executive Board Meeting
Monday, January 8, 2024
11:00 am – 1:00 pm PST / 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST

Call meeting to order: 2:03 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: Ken Rockwell, Zoe Dilles, Mike Smith, Jo-Ann Wong, Emilie Ducourneau, Jack Tieszen

Approval of minutes from last meeting:

Officer Reports & Check-In

  • Jessica Benner (President)
    • Got the indexing quote, listed below
  • Meg Miller (Vice President)
    • Save-the-dates for the conference being sent this week or early next week
  • Kat Strickland (Past President)
    • Listed below in action items and several have been done
  • Lena Denis (Secretary)
    • Spoke to Ryan about WAML membership
  • Bruce Godfrey (Treasurer)

    2023 Calendar Year
    Year Start Balance     $27,336.01
    Year End Balance       $27,378.25
    Overall +/-                $42.24

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

Simple Membership – Form Builder Addon (simple-membership-plugin.com) ($47)

Appointed Position Reports

  • Sarah Zhang (Information Bulletin Editor)
  • Ilene Raynes (IB Book and Geospatial Resources Review Editor)
  • Georgia Brown (IB Features Editor)
    • If you have any jobs, news, etc. you’d like to see about yourself or your collection in the IB, email Georgia (browngl@uwm.edu).
  • Nick Beyelia (Membership Manager)
  • Mike Smith (New Mapping Editor)
    • We’re doing New Mapping! Working with Ken
  • Amy Work (Social Media Manager)
  • Zoe Dilles (WAML Archivist)
    • Has been familiarizing herself with existing paper archives
    • What came up from last meeting: potential role for archivist in processing and posting conference recordings? And how to manage membership list and confidentiality?
    • Ken points out the pandemic stalled an idea from a few years ago to process photos from past archives
  • Kevin Dyke (Web Administrator)

Updates from task forces, committees, etc.

  • Continuing Education (Kat for now)
    • Kat wants to start working on virtual workshops
    • Wants to rethink the charge of this committee in general
  • Communications Committee (Georgia Brown)
  • Scholarship Committee (Jo-Ann Wong)
    • Plans to reach out to last year’s winners soon to get the ball rolling
    • Wants to know if the budget would be the same this year as last year? The Board (approval by email April 2023) made a one-time adjustment last year for it being in Vancouver.

      [Email request from Phillip White to Board 4/11/2023]
      “The Scholarship Committee would like to request from the Board that—for this year only—we award two scholarships of $1000, totaling $2000. This is mainly in consideration of the expense of getting to Vancouver. When we looked at the price of lodging alone for the duration of the conference, it was in excess of 700, and the would not leave enough for air fare.”

    • Jo-Ann will assume the original $1500 for now and discuss with last year’s winners

Old Business

  • Policies and Procedures (Jessica)
    • Any issues? Do you all approve of what is currently in the document?
      • All Exec Board members 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)
      • Put any comments in the doc
  • Indexer Costs (Jessica)
    • Calculated an estimate in this document by counting the words and pages of Volume 54 (issues 1-3) & Volume 55 (issue 1)
    • Probably best to go with words since we use a lot of images which can affect the number of pages.
    • Average number of words for these 4 issues is 16775.
      • @ $12.19 per 1000 words = $204.49
    • Average number of pages for these 4 issues is 59.
      • @ $4.53 per page = $267.27
    • Per 1000 words
      • (Estimated) 3 Issues per year = $613.47
      • (Calculated) Volume 54 = $609.42
    • Summary: about $200 per issue so about $600 per year
    • Ken points out that there’s also the compilation of issues in a cumulative index, as another piece of the job → do we come up with a rate per word? May not work as a proxy for that, but it’s an important part of the job
    • Kat suggests that people in the professional societies could confirm whether or not this is a reasonable rate, based on our issue size (not the same as indexing a book) and someone being hired to do this could potentially negotiate → next step for Ken could be to present issues of the IB to people in the US indexers’ group to get quotes from a handful of them
    • General agreement that asking the US indexing pros to give a quote would be a good idea, and Meg points out that this is very easy since our publications are open and posted online – we may want to think of this more as something where we’re asking someone to bid, as a contractor would, instead of a full posted job description
    • Suggestion action: Ken could post the work, with links to issues, to Reedsy or American Society for Indexing, to get quotes
      • ACTION: Ken will create a draft announcement for finding an indexer and run it by Exec Board members before posting
  • Listserv migration (Meg)
    • Meeting shortly with Evan to discuss what happens with the archive of messages

New Business

  • Discuss plan for the Stolen Maps (Kat & Meg with Tom)
    • Previous Conversation
    • Some notes – James Brubaker Stolen Maps
      • Many of the stolen maps were repatriated but about 3k are still at UCSB
    • 12/14/2023 meeting canceled postponed
      • Kat will reschedule and try to make it before next board meeting
      • Jessica suggests inviting Tom to next board meeting so we can discuss what WAML can do to help
    • Many of the remaining maps are from serial sets, so it may just make sense to offer them to people e.g. are you missing this set and do you want it
    • Kat and Meg are both interested in seeing if this project could be assigned to library school students
  • Nomination committee (Kat)
    • I have some notes from Evan. 
    • Kat can dig up the notes from Evan about this and look at what the details are
    • Any suggestions already?
      • Cheyenne Stradinger
    • Suggest any you can think of to the Exec Board as you think of them!
  • 2023 WAML Conference Swag (Jessica)
    • Jessica has the leftover T-shirts and mugs from Vancouver.
    • Want to offer the T-shirts to virtual attendees for a reduced fee, or should we charge full price? Original price is $25
    • Agreed that Jessica can just charge enough to cover shipping and will email attendees to see who wants one – nominal fee is $12 but that will adjust based on actual costs
      • ACTION: Jessica to email virtual attendees about t-shirt and mug sales (already an action item about this)
      • Emilie and Lena want one!

Potential Social Media Announcements

  • Ken: Tulare Lake in San Joaquin Valley (CA) that vanished decades ago and it reappears sometimes, should be mapped and covered in media → call for someone to photograph/discuss it
  • Conference save-the-date info

Next Meeting

Meeting adjourned: 2:58 pm EST

Minutes submitted by Lena Denis (Secretary).

Approved by the Executive Board by email on January 17, 2024.

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