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This fin-de-siecle finds LIRT pondering its future with many questions and few answers. For several years, leadership of LIRT has undertaken various exercises to help it work though its needed evolution into a viable entity for the future. Sharing the internal deliberations of an organization can be a big bore for those not intimately involved with it as it struggles with the issues at hand.
If you read the LIRT News for teaching tips and Tech Talk to gain practical, implementable, on-the-job hints and strategies to improve your teaching, this probably isn't the article for you. However, if you are interested in learning about how LIRT is addressing issues of organizational change, read on. A recap of LIRT's history will help put the planning efforts in perspective.
In 1993, LIRT President Tim Grimes appointed a task force to look at issues of retaining existing members and increasing the recruitment of new members to LIRT.
The task force met, deliberated, and wrote a final report that set forth recommendations which were presented to President Carol Derner in 1995.
In 1994, at the Midwinter Conference, concurrent with the Recruitment Task Force's activities, under LIRT President Charlotte Files, the Long Range Planning Committee undertook the process of conducting a simple environmental scan to identify trends in the external environment that either provide opportunities for devising new strategies or that threaten an organization's ability to implement its chosen goals.
They planned to perform this scan on a yearly basis. The Environmental Scan 1995-96 offered a revision of the first scan to reflect key issues the Long Range Planning Committee determined were likely to affect library instruction and LIRT in the foreseeable future. It was submitted to the Steering Committee, Executive Board, and published in the LIRT News (vol. 18, no. 1). The Long Range Planning Committee then focused its energy on planning a retreat with the goal "to re-energize people."
In 1997, at the Midwinter Conference LIRT conducted a retreat which you can read about in detail elsewhere in this newsletter. In terms of documentation, we have the Long Range Planning Committee recommendations based on the findings from the Retreat. We have the Recruitment Task Force Final Report (June 1995) with a set of recommendations. The recommendations from these two overlap significantly. And we have the Environmental Scan 1995-96 which poses many questions for LIRT to consider.
I have already asked the LIRT committee chairs to review and revise their committee's description in the Bylaws and the Manual. So we are well underway. In the upcoming months before the 1997 Annual Conference in San Francisco, I will work with the Executive Board to create action plans and timetables that address the issues set forth in these documents. Some tasks will be the responsibility of the Executive Board. Some tasks will be remanded to specific committees. All things considered, LIRT is moving apace in positioning itself for the 21st Century with vigor and resolve.