SALALM 62 - Presidential Message 1

• By: Daisy Domínguez
• On: 08/09/2016 05:50:20
• In: Presidential Messages

Dear members,

It has now been a few months since I've seen your smiling faces in Charlottesville. I would like to once again thank Paloma Celis-Carbajal, Miguel Valladares Llata, the Secretariat, and the entire SALALM 2016 team for all their hard work and for such an impressive experience. Attending our annual conference gives me a professional and spiritual lift. Hearing about all your projects is both inspiring and motivational. And the signature of the SALALM conference experience is the chance to spend time with such bright and warm colleagues. My personal SALALM afterglow tends to fade after a few weeks when my daily routine sets in. I am happy to report that this year, it feels like it is extending much longer because I can see that we are finding new ways to connect even while we are physically and temporally apart. Members are availing themselves of GoToMeeting, Skype, and the good old fashioned telephone to continue SALALM work after the last conference has wrapped up and leading up to the next one. The latest in this push for continuity are the Google Groups being created, most recently by the subcommittees for Marginalized Peoples and Ideas and Cataloging and Bibliographic Technology, respectively. Several of you also keep us current year-round via our social media presence on Facebook and Twitter. As a trusted SALALM advisor recently noted to me, these efforts are promising in terms of the possibilities of sustaining our work and productivity year-round. My compliments to all of you for your steadfast dedication and for keeping the fire lit throughout the year. SALALM is all the stronger for it!

Looking ahead to next year's conference, I would like to share that the theme has been finalized and translated into Spanish and Portuguese and is available for you to review and share. I would like to extend a special thanks to Ana Domínguez Ochoa, Luis González, and Hortensia Calvo for translating and editing the Spanish version and to Vera Araujo, Tim Thompson, and Ana DeAssis-Thompson for translating and editing our theme into Portuguese. Our panel and presentation submission form is now available, as well. Many thanks to Sarah Aponte and Tim Thompson for translating the form into Spanish and Portuguese. Please note that if you are proposing an individual paper rather than a panel, the panel-related fields will disappear (and vice-versa). Please also note that the paper and panel submission deadline falls on December 5, 2016 this time. The early deadline will allow us to accommodate the workshops and research-a-thons* to be featured at the conference. I hope that the integration of these new formats into our regular program will be a meaningful and worthwhile experience for all of you and look forward to receiving your paper and panel proposals.

My next message to you is scheduled for after my site visit with Barbara Álvarez, Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Many of you will be reading my post in the midst of the busy fall semester. You will also have received the SALALM membership renewal and committee preference forms, which are sent out in September, from the Secretariat. Please keep this in mind as you schedule your professional annual renewals. Here's to a successful fall semester!

Warm regards,
Daisy

* Thanks to Alison Hicks and Jesús Alonso-Regalado for helping me to add the term research-a-thon to my vocabulary.