The Full Faculty Meeting

It has been exciting here at SLIS. We were fortunate to have had a visit recently by Ms. Karen O'Brien, Director, Office of Accreditation at the American Library Association. She came to SLIS on November 9th and 10th, 2007 to discuss our progress on meeting the Standards for Accreditation. We are steadily making progress for the Program Presentation document for our next team visit to SLIS in March, 2009. The discussions were uplifting and she had many, helpful things to share with us. She also provided important insights into the accreditation process for the entire faculty, who met on November 10th to discuss issues related to the School, teaching and learning and accreditation from 8:30 - 2:00 p.m. Ms. O'Brien's talk can be seen by visiting the site for our faculty meeting
http://digitalmedia.cua.edu/calendar/event_dsp.cfm?event=3863.
I was impressed by the outstanding quality of our faculty, their dedication great ideas, and support for the School. It was a great day for me and I really enjoyed hearing from the faculty on myriad issues. We discussed our newly revised core values for SLIS: Collaboration, community, innovation and excellence. I welcome your thoughts on these ideals that our faculty felt accurately characterized SLIS and supported the greater university's values of Reason, faith and service. We have also developed a new vision and mission statement and we are finalizing our program goals and objectives.
The outcome of the break out groups on Saturday, which were focused on mechanisms to foster community were also very helpful. We're working toward making some improvements in our support for community to help to engage everyone to the greatest extent possible with our busy lives. Do you have ideas to share on how to foster community? Please share!

If you are interested in what we've accomplished to date, the faculty meeting Webcast is a good site to review. I discussed our progress in some depth at the meeting and gave specifics about the planning process we've been undergoing for SLIS to achieve full compliance with the ALA standards in 2009. I welcome your feedback on the faculty meeting, and any thoughts you have about our planning process here in SLIS.

In the near future, I will submit our first, formal report on our progress to the Committee on Accreditation for ALA. Further, we are working on a Web site to keep everyone informed of our activities and documents related to planning and accreditation. Be on the look out for this new Web site, which I'll also announce, soon after the new year.

As we enter the busy holiday season, let me wish you a joyous holiday season!