NSLA members once again convened online for their mid-year meeting on 24 July, with a four-hour agenda spread over two sessions. While we are holding out hope for the opportunity to meet in person in November for more indepth discussion, members were able to get through the business items at hand, compare notes on our continuing responses to Covid-19, and importantly, finalise the NSLA strategic plan for 2020-2023.
This meeting set the tone for the NSLA program of work over the next twelve months, and members welcomed the addition of Janice van de Velde to the NSLA office as Senior Adviser, Research and Policy. Discussion included GLAM sector committee activity, and the NSLA eResources Consortium report. Items of note from the list of decisions:
- An analytical report will be compiled by NSLA’s Senior Adviser, Research & Policy on the responses of NSLA libraries to Covid-19, to assist with contingency planning and advocacy.
- Content for the NSLA strategic plan for 2020-2023 was reviewed and endorsed, with a final iteration for public release in August.
- Funding was approved to assist with scoping and building work for new collaborative web archiving infrastructure.
- Funding was approved for projects relating to Indigenous collections as part of the broader Culturally Safe Libraries Program, including:
- work with AIATSIS and partners to incorporate Indigenous place names into catalogue records
- an audit of contemporary Indigenous collections and collecting practice in four libraries, working with external partners with research expertise in Indigenous collections.
- A small amount of discretionary funding was approved to progress research in fields of collective interest such as data science and AI, within and beyond NSLA libraries.
- The ‘End Stage 3’ report from the National edeposit (NED) Steering Group and Operational Group was endorsed, noting formal closure of NED’s build phase and commencement of its enhancement phase. This August marks one year since NED was launched in Canberra.
