Vice-President

(I’m going to be documenting what I do throughout the year as VP, with the goal that, by the end of the year, this will be a useful manual for next year’s officer. That means this page is unfinished and will keep changing. -AY)

Deadlines

You have some. See the LITA Officers’ todo list.

You may get additional deadlines from the following sources:

  • The orientation letter from the LITA Executive Director
  • The ALA Appointments Committee
  • The LITA Appointments Committee, per your plan for its work
  • Any other committees or task forces you’re involved with

It’s your job to get a gift for the outgoing past-president at Annual.

Documents

There are a lot of things to consider reading as they provide useful context for LITA and ALA. Rereading may be useful as many of these are long and dry, and it may take a while for them to stick. That said, it’s understandable if you don’t necessarily get through them all — this is a lot to read!

Appointments

You and your glorious Appointments Committee appoint LITA committees; LITA representatives to other bodies; and members of some ALA committees. This is the most important and time-consuming thing you are likely to do as VP.

There’s enough info on this topic that it has its own page: Appointments

Travel

  • ASAE meeting
    • Several dates and locations throughout the year
    • Arrange with LITA ED; you’ll be attending together

Misc

Dealing with your email

You will get a lot of email. You need a strategy for ensuring that you notice all your VP emails. For instance: set up gmail filters to filter all your mailing lists into a LITA Board folder, and also tag all incoming non-mailing-list LITA emails (there will be several per day).

You should be on the following mailing lists (you can confirm your subscriptions at http://lists.ala.org/sympa/):

  • ala-appt (ALA Appointments Committee)
  • divpres (Division Presidents)
  • lita-appointments (LITA Appointments Committee)
  • lita-fac (LITA Financial Advisory Committee)
  • litachairs (LITA committee & IG chairs)
  • litaboar (LITA Board)
  • lita-l (LITA-L, which hopefully you were already on anyway)
  • Your Forum list, and possibly also the list for the Forum before yours
  • You are not automatically on the ALA Council list, but its archives are public through http://lists.ala.org/sympa/, so you can read it if you like.
  • You should automatically receive copies of committee & representative activity reports (quarterly) and commitment reports (yearly).

LITA communications

LITA maintains social media and other communications channels that you should be aware of, even if you are not active on that particular platform: