From the Chair

Lynda Kellam

Dear GODORT Members,

I hope you are all enjoying the warming weather (or at least making the best of it). By the time this issue is published, I imagine that I will have spent several days sitting on my porch or hanging out at a gorge. I can’t wait. I also hope by the time you are reading this that most, if not everyone, has been able to get vaccinated.

During the past year, in addition to efforts to grow our membership, the leadership of GODORT has endeavored to retain a sense of community through a difficult time. Our Friday chats have been successful with a wide range of topics from government documents in the news to a discussion of the Mapping Prejudice Project. While we may not be able to sustain the pace of the chats indefinitely, I hope we can continue to come together informally in between conferences.

Moreover, our Social Media and Outreach Committee has been hard at work building up our GODORT profiles on Twitter (https://twitter.com/godort?lang=en) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/GODORT). I encourage you to follow the profiles and share our information if you haven’t already. We even have members live tweeting information out from most Friday chats.

Finally, we have a great program coming for the ALA Annual conference in June 2021. In addition to our usual meetings the week before the conference, we will have a juried program and a Chair’s program. We are still working on the plans for those but they will be announced soon.

My time as the Chair of GODORT has spanned the pandemic, and the tenure has been interesting to say the least. I am looking forward to a return to some level of normalcy. I sincerely hope to see you at our 50th anniversary celebrations during the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC in June 2022. We are already hard at work planning the festivities! If you are interested in helping out with that special event, please let me, Suzanne Caro, or Roberta Sittell know.

Lots more to come from GODORT that cannot be covered here. I am grateful for the camaraderie and conversation we’ve had together during this truly difficult year. I look forward to celebrating with you all virtually in June and physically in the near future!

Lynda Kellam (lmk277@cornell.edu), Senior Data Librarian, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research

“From the Chair” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.