STUDENT ASSOCIATION MINUTES - FEBRUARY 2007

Pratt School of Information and Library Science Student Association "SILSSA"

Meeting Minutes

February1, 2007, 5:30 – 6:30 pm, Pratt Manhattan, Room 610

 Submitted by Alicia Gibb, Secretary

SILSSA Officers in Attendance:

President, Lauren McBride

Vice President, Laena McCarthy

Secretary, Alicia Gibb

Treasurer/Webmaster, Bonnie Cohen Lafazan

Students/faculty in attendance:

1.      Dean Giannini

2.      Vinette Thomas

3.      Cindy Wolff

4.      Laura Gaudio

5.      Nicolas C. Jackson

6.      W. Rahemtulla

7.      Allison Byrum

8.      Maureen Ahearn

9.      Holly Deakyne

10.  Pilara Brunson

11.  Mary Leggiero

12.  Lesley Espenship

13.  Eric Cohen

14.  Stephanie Margolin

15.  Greg Zeichner

16.  Kyung Eun Kwon

17.  Robert Pilchman

18.  Kenneth Petricig

19.  Regina Houghtelins

20.  Becky Brauer

(There were several others in attendance; however this was from the Sign-in sheet that was passed around at the beginning of the meeting.)

Meeting started with:

  1. New Officers/Introduction:
    1. Lauren McBride – still President, heads up SILSSA, schedule and run the meetings, organize the holiday/ grad party, set up tours. Contact Lauren if you have any ideas or if you work at a library and want to schedule a tour. If you have any student issues or concerns. Or, if you want to get more involved, let her know. She can help if you want to organize something. She will also organize next term officer elections.
    2. Laena McCarthy – former treasurer, now the VP. She is going to plan some fun events this semester; she also attends all the faculty meetings and acts as a liaison for the students to the faculty. You can always find her at the library. She is also the library assistant.
    3. Bonnie Cohen Lafazan – webmaster and now webmaster and treasurer. She manages the SILSSA website and also will contact student affairs for cutting checks/handling budget and will be at meetings, you can contact her if you want to post pictures or have ideas for to the website.
    4. Our Keyword secretary has resigned for this semester. We are currently working on getting a new secretary to publish Keyword. We have a strong candidate who has expressed interest.
  2. LOC Trip – Nick Jackson, a new student, is heading the committee to set up the Library of Congress tour. It’s a one day trip to Washington DC. He is looking for people who want to help organize the trip. If you are interested, you can find his email address on the SILSSA website
  3. Salon – Laena is planning another salon for this semester at a local bar. It was a big hit last semester.
  4. Lauren was contacted by alumni who work at Credit Suisse. They want to do a tour. We are going to coordinate that with SLA@pratt to get one set up. Look for upcoming details on the silssa website.
  5. Buckminster Fuller Speaker – Laena is setting up a speaker event for this.
  6. Grad party – we are going to plan another graduation party that will be held the day before graduation. Similar to the holiday party- it will be open to all SILS students (not just graduates). Details will come as it gets closer. If anyone wants to contribute music for the event, let me know. We can always have a student play an instrument or something like that – IPOD play list. Doesn’t have to be the whole time. Also, the day of the party, we can always use extra help with decorations, or with PR (posters, etc.), carrying a bag of ice, helping move chairs/tables.
  7. Andrew Heiskell Braille and talking book tour- Lauren set one of these up last spring. Tried to get this going last semester. Ball was dropped. Lauren can try to set one up again this semester. Contact Lauren if you are interested in going.
  8. Keyword –We are still accepting Keyword submissions. In the meantime, please email your submissions to Lauren.
  9. Becky Brauer spoke up about setting up a blog. It was agreed that it would make sense for the blog to be separate from the PRATT server and just a student run blog with places to link, post jobs and discuss library issues.  Becky sent around a sign up sheet for those who want to be involved. She is heading up that committee. We also discussed how this could be separate from the sils email. The Dean was concerned about federal law and what is student property but if not on our severs and linked out to blogger or wordperss this should not be a problem.

 

 

Dean’s Forum, Dr. Giannini:

 

Dean was asked to address the issue of professors leaving.  She explained that it is illegal and unprofessional to discuss Human Resources decisions in a public forum.

 

She reassured students the Florence program would continue under advisement of Anthony Caradona.  She talked about how fortunate Pratt is to have the collaborative programs with the arts.

 

On April 27th: Metro will do an archives talk focusing on topics and skills.

 

There will be a Pratt festival in April.

 

The Dean was then asked to explain the tenure process by Lauren McBride.  The Dean said each year the faculty member is reviewed until their 7th year when they are up for tenure.  They are evaluated 50% on their research and 50% on their teaching and service.  Recommendations are made from student evaluations, staff members, and the dean.  The Board of Trustees makes the decision.  Pratt isn’t as stringent on the research requirement as the top research universities are because Pratt has more of a practical learning approach.  SILS has four tenured faculty out of the eight full time staff.  A professor must be full time to get tenure.  The number of full time staff to student ratio at Pratt should be 10 full time faculty members, which the dean explained SILS is starting the process for.  They will interview six people in the spring with the hopes of hiring two new faculty members for the fall. She also mentioned only 50% of the faculty at UCLA get tenured. 

 

SILS also has a continuing employment certificate for part time employees that is an understanding between the faculty and SILS that they will be returning. Full time employees are encouraged to do more research while part time employees are more profession based and Pratt gets people to come in with impressive backgrounds to give students a practical view of the field. 

 

The Dean then mentioned some of the new faculty members and their backgrounds: a law librarian, a cataloging the archives at NYPL, and a Columbia film/media librarian to name a few.

           

The topic of Museum Library Certificate was brought up by Nicholas Jackson.  Pratt is the only school in the U.S. and Canada that have this program.  He aims to start a student organization for this.

 

The Dean also mentioned that she recently put in an $800,000 grant for Pratt to partner with 5 museums. 

Questions:

            A question was asked if faculty benefit from teaching courses to reach a possible full time status.  The Dean said yes and reiterated the role of several part time people are because they are specialized professionals in the library field. 

           

Meeting ended with an important reminder from the Dean!

            We need to keep student / teacher relationships professional.  Students have been drawn into recent issues but the line needs to be respected.  We cannot cross the guidelines of the AARC.

 

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