2024-03-11 Business Meeting Minutes

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Minutes
WAML Executive Board Meeting
Monday, March 11, 2024
11:00 am – 1:00 pm PDT / 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT

Call meeting to order: 2:06 pm EDT

Officers in attendance: 

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

Absent: 

Other attendees: Georgia Brown, Dorothy McGarry, Jack Tieszen, sam hidde tripp, Ken Rockwell, Mike Smith, Zoe Dilles

Approval of minutes from last meeting:

Officer Reports & Check-In

  • Jessica Benner (President)
    • Mailed some t-shirts, reviewed the Conference Manual, and finished many of my action items.
  • Meg Miller (Vice President)
    • Worked more with Cheyenne on planning the conference, wants to discuss accommodations later in the meeting
    • Had discussion about archive of WAML listserv with Zoe, who’s investigating an option for that, and Meg will have a meeting in the next couple of weeks with Nick to discuss migrating the list to the new Google group
  • Kat Strickland (Past President)
  • Lena Denis (Secretary)
    • New job adjustments
  • Bruce Godfrey (Treasurer)
    • $1000 was spent to secure venue for the conference

Actions approved over email by E-Board since February 2024 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)
    • Email her features of interest!
  • Nick Beyelia (Membership Manager)
  • Mike Smith (New Mapping Editor)
    • Welcome suggestions and input, we can always use more material for anything you see happening in your region
  • Amy Work (Social Media Manager)
  • Zoe Dilles (WAML Archivist)
    • Coming at 3:00 pm to discuss archivist questions about recordings and membership information for the archive.
  • Kevin Dyke (Web Administrator)

Updates from task forces, committees, etc.

  • Continuing Education (Kat Strickland)
  • Communications Committee (Georgia Brown)
    • Working on WAML toolbox survey data crunching and will set up an editing party soon
    • Will attend next month’s meeting to help build a charge for the committees
  • Scholarship Committee (Jo-Ann Wong)
    • Request for extra funds for a third scholarship $750 for a total of $2250 this year. Is this a one-time request or ongoing request for 3 scholarships each year? Bruce says we have money to support it as a one time for sure, could comfortably for the next few years with current assets, but might need to come up with a long-term plan for making it sustainable
    • Let’s approve all 3 for this year and then have Jo-Ann come talk to us next month about longer term? All ayes, motion passes

Old Business

  • Indexer Position (All)
    • Asked Chrissy and Sarah to finish by Wednesday.
    • Index for each issue and cumulative index, right? yep
    • Draft up a few questions?
      • Expected challenges in this position
      • Experience (lib, geo, etc)
      • How to handle difficult use cases, such as people with similar names, ethics of discussing information about living people, etc.
      • How do they like to communicate with people they’re working for
      • Anticipated workflows
      • How are they comfortable getting paid (once a year, quarterly, etc.) (payment to be disbursed by IB editor). In the past we have paid using a physical check by US mail.
      • What proposed changes would they make in the index
    • Ken – do you want to schedule the Zoom Interviews or should I? Jessica will do it
    • ACTION: Jessica will schedule a meeting with Ken, Kat, Chrissy, and Sarah to figure out the dates we can offer for interviews, then schedule the 30-minute Zoom interviews for three candidates
  • WAML Physical Address (Jessica) 🥳
  • Letters of Appointment (Jessica)
    • Do these need to be approved? (no, they don’t) Do they go to Liaisons too or just Appointed Positions? Seems like a good idea! https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B4zp1x_XC5Zi14VW75bqQRUeuWzxKw4Z?usp=drive_link 
    • Can graduate students take on these roles? No reason anyone can think of why not
    • Action: Jessica will send a letter of appointment to Georgia as well, and generate one for Meg and Kat (not required for elected positions but helpful for job reasons – should we just start doing this?)
    • Action: Jessica will set up a meeting with Kat to discuss next steps about appointed position and liaison letters

New Business

  • Nominations Committee (Kat)
    • Process (From Bylaws and P&P)
      • March 1st: President appoints a three-member Nominating Committee which shall include the Past President.
      • Committee chair (Kat) solicits nominations from membership.
      • April 30: Committee chair discusses slate with President
      • May 15: Committee chair gets consent & submits slate (bios and statements of purpose) to Secretary, and informs the Executive Board of the slate.
      • Secretary (Lena) runs the election via email with a posted deadline date (no later than the first week of June).
      • Secretary counts & notifies the President of the results of the election.
      • President (actually Secretary) notifies the newly elected officers, the current Executive Board members and the unsuccessful candidates of the results of the election.
      • Secretary notifies the Membership of the results of the election via the Information Bulletin and other appropriate publications of the Association.
    • New Board should be ready to start on July 1, 2024.
  • WAML Conference accommodations (Meg)
    • Came across a note about making it possible for people to share rooms who want to share – wants to come up with a system for soliciting emails of people who are willing to share rooms so they can work together on identifying each other
    • Agreed plan with least work for us: have a question during registration about whether or not people are willing to share rooms, and have them opt into a spreadsheet where they can put their contact info with notes (snores, non-smoker, etc. in a generic preferences column we don’t police) and people can find each other
  • Membership portal revisit
    • Jessica will discuss the new portal and WordPress plug ins with Kevin and Nick in May to see how it’s working out
  • Archiving procedures so far (Zoe) – Conference materials
    • Conference materials from Reno (2019) is the last one in the archive (https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/ff473vg5979)
    • Also some ephemera in Zoe’s office from past conferences, plus the backlog since 2019, that can be streamlined for deposit into Stanford Digital Repository (https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11412509)
    • Zoe will also need to go through the Google Drive folders from past conferences of what should be archived and what doesn’t need to be – will take feedback on this – and can start doing that as soon as her account is set up and she has access to the folders (someone needs to grant this to her)
    • Everything she’s seen so far is fully discoverable, doesn’t look like we have anything that needs to remain dark, since PII doesn’t go beyond name and affiliation
    • Are there past recordings to archive? Any privacy concerns there?
    • Would be great to have transcripts if they exist for past ones, and in the future we can’t put anything up that doesn’t have transcripts/captions – these things are probably in the various drive folders Zoe needs
      • ACTION: Meg will grant Zoe access to the past conferences Google Drive folders so she can archive the contents
  • Membership info
    • How do we archive membership info and protect member privacy? Maybe just names, dates active, and roles? Dates are tricky because you wouldn’t necessarily know the start and end dates, plus the membership rosters that the membership manager should be sending to the archive each year are a snapshot of that year’s active members → Zoe can upload this each time she gets it from Nick, with any contact info taken out beyond institution and role
    • Could be worth promoting the list of members to incentivize people to pay dues, and to promote the archive – Zoe is fine with formulating and sending a message like this once a year; should consider the privacy implications of this even with contact information stripped, especially since this isn’t something people have agreed to previously, might want to give people an opportunity to opt out
    • Nick could put the opt out process in new membership forms from now on – this should be discussed at the annual meeting
  • The old email listserv
    • Needs to be considered in general and decided upon, probably will use MBox viewer, which makes it look like an open mailbox to the end viewer, but you can import and export this data
    • Considerations contingent on format and size of emails
    • Zoe’s setup is so that they would be totally public or completely dark (only visible to Stanford folks) but no way to make it just WAML members who could see it – how do we handle this? Make it live behind a members-only area somehow, e.g. the Google Drive or part of the website somehow
  • Zoe also proposes archiving the website
    • This is apparently something we’ve done in the past, and Stanford has a homegrown product for doing this (Western Association of Map Libraries (WAML) in SearchWorks catalog)
    • Is this something we want to continue doing periodically? Last period of frequent archiving was when we redesigned the site in 2021
    • Pretty simple process once initiated, not cumbersome, so maybe just once a year to capture who were the officers and appointees, etc. → agreed once a year, after the conference
    • Could work with Kevin to link up the website and the archival links
  • Physical archive
    • Hasn’t been added to since 2015
    • Finding aid
    • Zoe can work on adding materials to the physical archive after the fall conference
  • Should the Board do anything about the email announcement on the passing of Muriel Strickland?
    • A note in the Letter from the President would be good, for the IB
    • Memorials section of website
    • ACTION: Jessica will follow up with Kat about writing up a memorial announcement about Muriel Strickland’s passing as part of president’s letter, etc.
    • ACTION: Kat will reach out to Kathy Rankin about writing something as a memorial for Muriel Strickland on the website, make sure others we celebrated at last year’s conference are on there too

Potential Social Media Announcements

Next Meeting

  • Lena will be on an eclipse vacation on the 8th, can we move it a week? General agreement that Monday 4/15 will work great, same time
    • ACTION: Lena will reschedule the next meeting to be same time but on April 15th

Items on deck

  • Listserv Migration (Meg) – check in in May about this
  • Stolen Maps (Kat, Meg)
  • Committee updates (Jessica) – April
  • Policies and Procedures update, Communications Committee charge (Jessica) – for April meeting
  • Virtual workshops (Kat) – part of the committee charge discussion
  • Membership Management and Portal (Jessica with Nick and Kevin)

Meeting adjourned: 3:56 pm EDT

Minutes submitted by Lena Denis (Secretary).

Approved by the Executive Board by email on March 19, 2023

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