For the past 15 years or more, the close of the American Library Association's (ALA) annual conference has been my own unofficial end of summer. Normally, May and June were the busiest conference season, with a string of gatherings from ISO's TC 46 plenary meeting and NISO's own Board of Directors meeting to conferences hosted by the alphabet of soup of related organizations in our community--MLA, SSP, CSE, NASIG, SLA, AAUP, ARL. One can't attend each meeting, but most years, I attended a majority of them. Wrapping everything up every June is the ALA meeting, which is always a busy conference for the NISO staff. When it is over, we collectively breathe a large sigh of relief, take a very brief moment, and then dive right back into planning the fall, the next year, and beyond.
During the ALA meeting, NISO hosted its Annual Meeting and Update session. Please see here for slides from the event, and feel free to contact me regarding the annual report if you would like more details. Our annual meeting always offers an excellent opportunity to reflect, mid-year, on the progress we have made and that we have a lot to be proud of. Among the great things we can reflect on so far this year have been the draft release of two new efforts, NISO Issues in Vocabulary Management and our Standards Tag Suite. We have launched six new projects. Importantly, we are working toward some valuable reorganization of our standards portfolio and leadership; that reorganization is nearly complete and should lay the groundwork for continued advances in our pace and portfolio scope.
Over the past year, we have added nine new voting members, including several large organizations just in the past month. We have also added seven new Library Standards Alliance members to the organization since the beginning of 2017. Welcome and thank you to all of those new members! Looking forward, we are planning the launch of a redesigned website this fall, the release of a new online publication, and a fresh educational program format.
I recall a time early in my career when summer was a time to relax. The New York publishing tradition of "summer hours" was in force at three of the publishers I worked for before NISO. Sadly, the world now seems to move at a breakneck pace and we are all moving constantly from the last thing to the next big project. But research has pointed to the fact that this pace can be both unhealthy, stressful, and, despite all appearances, less productive.
I do have plans to dig into a few books this summer. One that I recommend to you all is Bobbi Newman and Bonnie Tijerina's LITA Guide, Protecting Patron Privacy. Though it is perhaps not the lightest beach read, it is an important introduction to the privacy issues facing libraries and how technological changes impact those concerns. Another book on my summer reading list is one I picked up at ALA, Corey Doctorow's new Walkaway: A Novel, which, based on his prior writings, will be thought provoking. Finally, I'm fascinated by the implications of genetic editing, so I'm planning to dig into A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg. I hope each of you has time to settle back at the beach or by the pool with a cool drink and a great book. In the end, getting authors' ideas into the hands and minds of readers and users is what NISO is trying to make more efficient. Enjoy!
Sincerely,
Todd Carpenter
Executive Director