The two areas where I really challenged myself to take a leadership role were with my independent study building a digital library and taking the role of Secretary of the Association of Library and Information Science Students (ALISS). Being able to take a project like the digital library from the seed of an idea to a full-scale implementation provided plenty of leadership challenges. As ALISS Secretary, I was able to take my expertise and leverage it to provide new opportunities for next year’s leadership team to move forward with changes that our group of officers was able to initiate.

Realizing the digital library required some key skills. Laurel Sercombe, the archivist, was anxious to get the project started when we first decided to go ahead. It was sometimes challenging to assure her that things were moving at a good pace and that ensuring each decision along the way was thoughtfully executed would mean the difference between a project that survived and one that sputtered like so many digital metadata projects. We worked closely to develop the metadata schema in a way that would be the most useful to the community of users. There were definitely negotiations involved, and I learned that sometimes ideals needed to be compromised for an effective implementation.

Another major issue with the project was negotiating support from the IT team. The archives is supported by the Music Department IT group, which happens to be a group of one. The buy-in from IT was crucial to ensure that the project would have technical support to keep it stable after I left the iSchool and was no longer involved. We also needed IT's expertise for the server installation and support. I helped Laurel to achieve this by meeting with the IT manager over the course of the independent study, making sure that he understood the scope of the project and letting him know exactly what maintaining the library will take over time. As a result, we were able to have his full support and he is now very interested in the software and may look to using it to implement other online collections for the archives. I am really proud of the leadership that has realized this project to make these materials accessible to not just the local, but a global community.

My involvement with ALISS, however, was completely different. When student officer elections opened in Winter 2007, the one thing that I knew was that I did not want to be ALISS Secretary. I knew that the Secretary was responsible for the dreaded book sale, and coming from a non-profit background, I had a very good idea of what those kinds of fundraising events meant: an immense amount of work with a limited return. As nominations started coming in and I looked at what positions were open, I was excited by the other students participating in ALISS – they were colleagues that I knew had great ideas and would be fantastic to work with. The Secretary position was still open, and I began to think that maybe I could be Secretary and avoid the book sale! It seemed a great way to take my fundraising experience and make some positive changes to the way fundraising was approached.

While the book sale is a long-standing tradition, my issues with it were not just the workload. I was concerned that there was a model in place where one person (the ALISS Secretary) was pretty much responsible for a fundraising effort to produce Spring Fling, an event for the entire iSchool. It seemed an odd choice of fundraising events because of the amount of physical labor and the way that it forced in-person support from faculty and staff. For a program that has a thriving alumni list and hundreds of students around the country, it seemed that this might not be the most efficient fundraising activity; it certainly was not reaching the majority of the iSchool community.

In Spring 2007, our officer group took the helm. We came to the table with a thousand new ideas, but quickly learned that we needed to learn the ropes before implementing some of these changes. We also realized that even though we were a dedicated group, just maintaining the status quo took quite a bit of work outside of our studies. Some of our early ideas for additional fundraisers, like our Guybrarian Calendar, were held up by various administrative processes that we not anticipate coming out of the gate.

I realized as fall quarter went on and we had no new fundraising initiatives that changing things in ALISS was going to take more than one year of work by one group of students. The biggest issue with forgoing the book sale at that point was not having funding for the iSchool Spring Fling in the spring of 2008. I was not very happy that one student was essentially responsible for the funding efforts for a party that served the entire iSchool. With the support of Beth Sanderson, our president, I was able to begin lobbying for increased support from the other student groups in the iSchool.

At the same time, I put my fundraising experience to use for the book sale. I could not have done this without the support of my fellow officers, specifically Beth Sanderson and Meghan Madonna. Meghan volunteered to be the volunteer coordinator – putting in tireless hours coordinating donation pickups all around the region. Beth was essential in setting the tone for officer participation and support of the event. This kind of support is what enabled me to work on publicity, setting up a permanent online storefront, and navigating the logistics for a successful sale.

According to ALISS records, this year’s book sale was the most successful sale ever (narrowly edging out the work of iSchool Lecturer Trent Hill), raising more than $4,700 to date. But the entire time that I was working on this year’s sale, I have also been working on other fundraising efforts. The online store is now a permanent part of ALISS fundraising (raising more than $700 to date); I have also started a Café Press store where merchandise can be sold, set to go live in the next week or so. (preview the Café Press store) Now, rather than having a book sale whose success largely depends on a significant amount of manual labor, next year’s officers have a real opportunity to experiment and try some new things. They will have twice the operating budget that our group had, and there will be new fundraising initiatives that can engage the alumni and online MLIS communities who are not always available for in-person volunteer support.

Having met this year’s officer group, I know they are up to the challenge of finding creative ways to support student initiatives through the ALISS grants program and continuing with the work we began over the last 12 months.