For New Yorkers: Report on the Meeting of the Regents Advisory Council on Libraries, Jan. 28

The Regents Advisory Council on Libraries met by phone on Jan. 28 for a short meeting.  This meeting was held days before the governor released his 2011-2012 budget, and indications were that the budget was going to contain bad news (and it did).  


During the conference call, we received a brief update from Deputy Commissioner Jeffrey Cannell on other legislative news, the December 2010 Regents Cultural Education Meeting, and the budget's effect on the State Library.   

John Hammond reported on the 2020 Vision process action plan and next steps.  Work on this began at the NYLA Annual Conference and will continue this year with other library partners.  The group wants to gather ample input from others and discussed how that might happen.  A session on this 2020 Vision is already scheduled for the NYLA 2011 Annual Conference.

The 2020 Vision grew out of our meeting with the Regents Cultural Education Committee last year, and so our report to them this year include an update on that effort.

We did discuss other topics, including the need for school librarians and work that is being done on literacy standards.   John Monahan and Sara Kelly Johns led those discussions.

Advisory Council members go to the Albany in February to meet with legislators and we discussed that activity.  Since Jan. 28, we have learned that the date we'd selected is not a date when legislators will be in Albany (day after President's Day), so we're discussing alternatives.