• NELLCO Spring Board of Directors Meeting
• ICOLC 
• Art in Law Libraries; Law Libraries as Art 
• NEW: Weekly Roundup!

It's March here in Albany and from my office window it's still a winter landscape. After a weekend of rain washed away much of the blackened snow accumulated over the course of the last few months, a storm earlier this week (I guess it's that lion thing) left a pristine coat of white and trees sheathed in ice. While I see the beauty I'm anxious for the lamb! The longer days will be a great start. Don't forget to spring ahead this weekend, March 13, 2011.

The NELLCO Board of Directors meets twice each year, spring and fall. Our spring meeting is always adjacent to the spring Law Librarians of New England (LLNE) meeting in an effort to support attendance at LLNE by members of the NELLCO Board. This year, we'll be meeting at Yale Law School, where we'll be hosted by Blair Kauffman, Law Librarian and Professor of Law. Our meeting is scheduled for Thurs. March 17.

The NELLCO BOD meetings require a serious commitment on the part of the members. The Board is composed of one representative from each of NELLCO's 25 full member libraries. Attendance at meetings is very high despite the demands of a full day (and sometimes day and a half) agenda. The Board, governed by the Executive Committee, makes the decisions and sets the course for NELLCO. Some of the issues on our agenda next week include a preliminary report on the results from our focus groups, a discussion about the benefits and value of membership, an evaluation of our current membership and dues structure, and decisions about some potential non-dues revenue streams. In addition to setting our budget, reviewing our finances, electing a treasurer, and completing the performance review of yours truly, the Board has a very full day!

Following the BOD Meeting I'll be headed to Austin, TX for the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) meeting. ICOLC is a very loosely organized but highly effective group of consortium leaders and professionals. We meet twice a year; once in the U.S. and once abroad. This month we're looking at discovery vendors, e-books, the next 'big thing' in consortium world, inter-consortial collaborations, publishing business models, and lots more. ICOLC and my ICOLC colleagues are a great resource for me in my daily work. Take a look at the statements and documents issued by ICOLC. They are good tools to have in your kit.

On another note, I invite you all to share the beauty of your libraries with the members of NELLCO. I have visited many member libraries and have seen some amazing art and architecture. From actual artwork hanging on the walls (an original Peter Max at Quinnipiac University School of Law) to the space itself as art (the beautifully preserved art deco architecture of the Bullocks Wilshire department store, repurposed as the Southwestern Law School), law libraries can house hidden treasures. If you have something beautiful in your library that you'd like to share, a sculpture, painting, portrait, photograph, unique staircase or window, please send us a picture or video. We'll include it in the newsletter and add it to our website. And if your library needs a little something aesthetically, see below about wood sculptor and clockmaker James Borden, whose extraordinary, one-of-a-kind timepieces are being offered to NELLCO members for the first time.

Finally, please note the newest piece of our communication strategy. As you may know, NELLCO is on twitter (@nellcoinc). We know many of you are not, but we still want you to know what's happening. So, we've launched the NELLCO Weekly Twitter Roundup! This is an automated aggregation of all of NELLCO's tweets from the previous week using an application called paper.li. Paper.li is free to use, and it organizes all of our tweets into categories and creates a newspaper type format for the reader. It's not perfect. The categories are auto-generated and not very useful, and they insert ads to keep it free. But it does you give you a single site to drop by and see what NELLCO's tweeting! Bookmark it and check back each week.

Yours In Collaboration,

Tracy L. Thompson-Przylucki

Executive Director