Community Support

One of the ways the Alliance supports member staff is by maintaining community spaces for communication and gathering. Here’s information to sign up for email lists, locate regular meetings, and access agendas.

Email Lists

The Alliance manages both open and closed email lists.

Open email lists can be joined by any individual at a member library and tend to focus on information-sharing and community support. More details for these lists, and how to join them, are shared on the Alliance Email Lists page.

Closed email lists are restricted to members of working groups and are used to conduct group business. Group members are automatically added to the group’s list when groups are finalized.

Meetings, Community Calls, & Events

The Alliance holds a variety of meetings, community calls, and events for member staff to gather, share information, and collaborate on projects. Alliance program pages share information, and reminders of upcoming calls or events are sent to program discussion lists. We use Google Workspace to share agenda documents with working groups and program communities.

Group Meetings

Working group meetings are limited to members of the working groups. These meetings are typically scheduled for twice a month, though schedules may vary to support project needs. Groups have dedicated email lists for communication and receive calendar entries. Information about group meetings is posted to the Alliance Meeting Calendar.

Groups have dedicated Google Drive folders to create, collect, and maintain working documentation. These folders also include working group agendas. Alliance Central Staff confirm access to the Google Drive folders at the beginning of each academic year for the group.

Community Calls

Community calls are open to all Alliance member staff. Depending on the program community, the schedule may be once a month, twice a month, or as needed. Information about community calls is also posted to the Alliance Meeting Calendar. Programs share more details and agendas both to their program discussion lists and from their respective community calls pages:

Alliance Central Staff may occasionally host Alliance-wide community calls to share and gather information about topics that have broad impact, especially for the Shared Integrated Library System (SILS). These calls occur as needed, and program managers send information to all email lists to announce both the calls and follow-up actions.

Events

Events are open to all Alliance member staff and focus on community connections and professional development. Common events include training and speaker series, Alliance Connections (formerly known as Summer Meeting), and program meetings (also sometimes called program days). Information about upcoming events is typically shared to the Announce email list, with program-specific information shared to program discussion lists.