Member input gathered over the last several years through surveys, focus groups, and discussions led the ALCTS executive committee to conclude we need to reshape our organization. Our members expressed the following concerns:

• ALCTS no longer reflects the diversity of job functions performed by those employed in collections and technical services.
• Members are frustrated by competing and overlapping programming.
• Processes are slow and not always clear in part because of redundancy in governance.

The executive committee, with input from the board, worked this year to construct alternative organizational scenarios that we have now shared with the entire membership for comment. In developing the scenarios, we were looking at options to achieve the following goals:

• Members must be able to find a community of colleagues doing the same work or with similar interests.
• The structure and processes must be transparent.
• The structure must be flexible enough to respond quickly to emerging trends.
• The organization must provide opportunities for service and leadership.

We look forward to reviewing the feedback from the member survey and from the animated discussions at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference and plan to present a refined plan for a member vote sometime next year.

In the meantime, the division undertook a process to revise its bylaws so future changes resulting from reorganization would not be slowed by outdated and ambiguous documentation. While the Organization and Bylaws Committee accomplished most of its work in 2008–9 under the leadership of Dale Swensen, the bylaws were put to a membership vote in fall 2009. The new bylaws passed with an overwhelmingly positive vote.

While working toward a reorganization of the division, the executive committee recognized a need and an opportunity to address continuing-education issues. In-person workshops were no longer drawing an audience unless attached to a conference, members were expressing concerns about travel support from their institutions, and the multilayered education committee structure of the division and sections slowed the move of new ideas and products to market. We decided that a change to the education committee structure could move forward before changing the entire organization and might serve as a model for streamlining other product-driven committees, such as the publication committees.

To this end, the ALCTS board approved the dissolution of the ALCTS Education Committee and the creation of a new Continuing Education (CE) Committee that began work in summer 2009. Chaired by Pamela Bluh, this committee has quickly coordinated a robust program of Web courses and webinars that complement programming at conferences. Web courses, offered by ALCTS for several years now, continue to be popular. These four-week modules cover acquisitions, electronic resource acquisitions, collection development and management, and new this year, preservation. Under development are courses in collections assessment, cataloging, and serials. With the energetic shepherding of CE members, sixteen webinars were offered this year, almost tripling the number presented last year. These webinars covered institutional repositories, cataloging of unusual formats, metadata, disaster planning and response, among other topics. The popular e-forums begun last year by then President Dina Giambi now have a coordinator, Kristin Martin, who is an ex-officio member of the CE Committee. Generally held monthly, these e-mail conversations continue to attract members and nonmembers, with more than one thousand participants on the e-forum list. We are grateful to the many members who participate in CE by developing the content for webinars and Web courses, who suggest topics, and who participate in and evaluate these events. We look forward to the CE Committee’s assessment of its first-year lessons learned and, in particular, how the liaison relationships with the sections have worked.

The division has not been alone in its focus on reshaping its structure. Several sections have been working to simplify their structures during the last several years. The Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) completed its transition this year to a slimmed down committee structure. Several topic-based committees were reconstituted as interest groups. The Collection Management and Development Section (CMDS) has decided to revise its mission and change its name to the Collection Management Section (CMS), which took effect after the 2010 Annual Conference. It has also reduced its committees from eight to six and converted three committees to interest groups. The Continuing Resources Section (CRS) has been streamlining by combining its Education Committee with its Research and Publications Committee. The new Education, Research, and Publications Coordinating Committee, with a new mission, will take effect with the 2010–11 appointments. The Council of Regional Groups (CRG), ALCTS’s connection to its affiliate members, has proposed changing its status from a section-like structure to a division-level committee with a new name, Affiliate Relations Committee. We believe that the good work of CRG will be more visible and integrated with such a change.