Quick update

Good news for Western Cape branch ... we won the Bookdata Nielsen President Award for the Best Branch. The judging was based on membership (retention and new), and activities and services to our members, amongst others. (The fact that the President is from the Western Cape had nothing to do with us getting the award) . So congratulations Western Cape!

The other big news from last night's gala event was the announcement of a new award - the LIASA SABINET Online Librarian of the Year Award -- which replaces the other LIASA Sabinet awards. The prize is nothing less than R30 000 to be used for a study tour. You need to be paid-up LIASA member to be eligible. Each branch will have to nominate one librarian. Watch this space, the email, and the Western Cape newsletter for more information about how the Western Cape will call for nominations.

Other items that have come up:
* talk about HELIG (Higher Education) changing its name to something like Academic and Research Libraries Interest Group to accommodate libraries in FET Colleges and our big research libraries (like HSRC, CSIR, MRC, NLSA ). There will be further discussion about this over the next few months. Concern was expressed from the floor about the position of RETIG (which had research in its title) and Special Libraries -- there would be discussions with them.

My own feeling is that the RESEARCH in RETIG is the act of Researching, but Research in the proposed name for HELIG refers to RESEARCH LIBRARIES.

* talks about LIASA becoming a statutory body... this rises out of a motion proposed at last year's AGM which resulted in a study by Reggie Ragu on the statutory status of LIASA (and reported back on in a paper at this year's conference) . The concern was that people were appointed as librarians either do not have LIS qualifications. HELIG discussed this topic at their session yesterday & concern was expressed that the study only looked at LIASA , but should look at LIS professional association as a whole. The example that was cited and thought to be a basis for us, was the Nursing Council.