EBSCO offers five scholarships to attend 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting

CHICAGO – The American Library Association (ALA) and EBSCO are partnering to offer five scholarships for librarians to attend the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston. The meeting takes place Jan. 15-19, 2010, and offers an opportunity for continuing education, meetings and interaction with colleagues.
Each EBSCO scholarship will be in the amount of $1,500, and one of the five scholarships will be awarded to a first-time conference attendee. The scholarship money is to be used for conference registration, travel and expenses.

Deadline for entry is Nov. 23, 2009, and the application information can be found at: www.ala.org/ala/awardsgrants/awardsrecords/ebscosponsorship/ebscosponsorship.cfm.

Scholarship recipients will be notified no later than Dec. 15, 2009.

To apply, candidates must complete the application criteria and submit an essay that answers the following question: “What do you believe to be the biggest challenge in managing electronic resources in libraries today, and what solutions do you envision?” Essays and applications will be judged by a jury designated by ALA.

About EBSCO
EBSCO is the world’s premier full-service provider of information, offering a portfolio of services that spans the realm of print and electronic subscription access and management, research databases and more. The company’s e-resource renewal and management tools help librarians accomplish in hours what once took weeks. For more information, please visit www.ebsco.com.

Last night, I spent a good hour looking working on my committee volunteer requests (The ALA President-Elect is accepting requests until 12/4). Only five minutes of that was spent actually filling in the form, the remaining 55 was spent visiting the ALA website and surfing the bewildering number of ALA committees (21) and council committees (16) — here’s the full list. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, almost every division and roundtable has its own set of committees (and subcommittees) as well. I’m leaving the math on that as an exercise for the reader.

Happily (?), I only needed to select from the list of ALA committees and council committees. After reading over everything (hint to ALA: it sure would be nice to have a brief summary of all the committees on one webpage — clicking 36 separate links was not a fun task) , I decided to request the Web Site Advisory Committee and the Training, Orientation & Leadership Development Committee. My technical background would be useful on the Web Site Advisory committee, plus I have a few annoyances with regards to the website that I’d like addressed such as speed on certain webpages (getting ketchup out of a bottle is faster) and with broken links.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I also requested to serve on the NMRT Midwinter Social committee for 2010-2011 as well. Oy.

In spite of all this, I’m looking forward to learning more about the inner workings of ALA and working with some interesting people doing interesting things. This should be interesting.