Membership Committee
Annual Report

Membership Records

The Chapter currently lists 1217 members tracked by the Membership Chair in an MS Access database, including 1044 national individual members, 168 local members (net increase of 3), and 5 local student members (net increase of 1). In addition there are 29 national members that opted out of third party communications and are not in the database, so the total membership is 1246. Since May 2006, 74 local and 5 student members joined or renewed with a total payment of $1225. I sent renewal notices to local members at the end of November, with follow-up notices on January 31. I created and sent welcoming letters to all new national and local members and sent their e-mail addresses to Paula Carey to add to the ACRL/NEC listserv. I also sent information on new and renewing members to SIG chairs for the SIGs they listed on their membership forms.

During the year I worked with ACRL to resolve discrepancies in our records for national members and deleted records for those who are not currently national members of ACRL. Our database contained 302 names coded as national members that were not on the ACRL national list. I sent these to ACRL to verify whether any of them were among the 61 members that opted out of third party communications. From that list they identified 34 people that are still members of ACRL national and remain in our database. At this point we have no way to identify the other 29 members. Because of these discrepancies I was not able to determine a net increase or decrease for national members. Now that the database has been updated, we should be able to determine this more accurately next year. ALA announced in February that it would change its communication preferences to make it easier to identify our national members who had opted out of third party communications, but as of today they don’t appear to have changed the options in the membership applications on their website.

During the year I handled several membership verification requests for individual members, SIGs, annual conference registration, and the nominating committee.

Membership Fees

In preparation for reviewing the membership fee structure for the year, I distributed information to the board about other organizations for comparison. Following discussion, a motion to raise the membership fee for regular members to $15 and to eliminate multi-year memberships was approved. This change was implemented successfully in September 2006.

Membership/Outreach Initiatives

At the August 9 board meeting I led a preliminary discussion of membership/outreach activities. At the request of Christine Turner I distributed the document ACRL/NEC Proposed Membership/Outreach Activities, summarizing discussion from the August 9 board meeting and suggesting additional possible initiatives for further consideration. Preliminary activities were undertaken after the Communications Committee met in September. I requested promotional materials from ACRL and have made them available to SIG Chairs and Officers at board meetings and by mail.

Respecfully submitted,
Kendra St. Aubin
Membership Chair

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