To: Our Colleagues in the Library Community
From: Brooke Sheldon, Director, School of Information Resources and Library
Science, University of Arizona
February 3, 2003
ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE NOW TO SUPPORT SIRLS
I want to begin by thanking you once again for your outpouring of support
for SIRLS through your letters, messages and phone calls. This has
been
a great help to us in convincing University Administration of our importance
to the Arizona library community and beyond. Although we are still
in the
process of securing our future, we remain confident that SIRLS will endure
and emerge stronger from this crisis.
Many of you have asked what else you can do to help SIRLS through this difficult
time and in the longer term. In response to your inquiries I am offering
here a broad range of actions for your consideration that could be taken
by libraries, library organizations or individuals. These are concrete
ways
you can help ensure that SIRLS continues to provide you with well-trained,
committed staff.
1. Help Us Raise Money
In addition to basic operating funds, SIRLS needs money to provide financial
support for students, increase course offerings through the use of adjunct
faculty, keep the technology used to train students from being outdated,
and provide enrichment programs, speakers and events for students and the
library community at large. You can help in the following ways:
- Help our newly revitalized Alumni Association raise funds from SIRLS
grads and other library supporters in Arizona.
- Ask your Friends or other support groups to donate some portion of
their gifts to support scholarship in general or specifically to support
continuing
- Knowledge River, our initiative to recruit Hispanics and Native Americans
to librarianship.
- Consider developing one or more paid internships for students to help
libraries recruit new staff, help students get front-line experience, and
assist in
- mitigating the increased costs of their education.
- Work with us to identify and cultivate potential individual and organizational
donors.
- Support our SAVE SIRLS drive to establish an endowed chair as a way
to increase the number of faculty.
2. Help Us Create SIRLS' Future
- As SIRLS develops new ways to sustain itself, there will be many opportunities
for the field to contribute their ideas and skills to its growth.
- Let the University know that you support the fee increases necessary
to make SIRLS self-sustaining.
- Volunteer for consideration as adjunct faculty, or if you are an administrator,
make staff time available to perform this valuable service. SIRLS needs
to tap into more of you with the qualifications and experience to teach courses.
- Help us recruit excellent students from the range of backgrounds and
interests that reflect the needs and concerns of Arizona's population.
- Join us, as the opportunities present themselves in finding ways to
solidify the Masters program, develop an undergraduate program that suits
Arzona's growing need for information professionals, revitalize the Ph.D.
program and explore new post-Masters options that will create new areas of
specialization.
3. Share Your Creativity with SIRLS on Ways We Can Work Together
We know we have not exhausted the many ways we can collaborate to make a
stronger SIRLS and a stronger Arizona library community. We invite
you,
as always to share your ideas with us and to let us know how we are doing.