IRRT Blog

Meet the ALA Emerging Leaders Team (2015-2016) and Learn about Their IRRT Project

(From Left to Right: Myriam, Mandi, Charissa, Sean, Jason)

The Emerging Leaders Program is an ALA program that gives support to new/emerging library leaders http://www.ala.org/educationcareers/leadership/emergingleaders. Different ALA division/Roundtables are asked to sponsor Emerging librarian leaders by giving $ support for them to attend ALA Conferences and gain professional experience in leading and completing a project. The Emerging Leader (EL) that IRRT sponsored this past year (2015-2016) was Charissa Powell, Undergraduate Experience Librarian at Kansas State University. IRRT submitted a project for ELs and it was accepted. Thus, Charrisa, and a team of 4 other ELs (sponsored by other ALA divisions/roundtables) agreed to take on this project. The total team composition was:

1. Charissa Powell (Kansas State University) 

2. Sean Buckner (Texas A&M University)

3. Jason Broughton (South Carolina State Library)

4. Myriam Martinez-Banuelos (University of North Texas)

5. Mandi Goodsett (Cleveland State University)

IRRT member Lucas Mak (Michigan State University), honorary team member and former EL himself, was assigned as the team’s mentor/adviser.

The project was titled the “IRRT Free Links: Disaster Planning & Recovery”.  IRRT maintains a page of “free links” (links to free library-related resources) on different themes.  One theme is technology. Another theme is library advocacy.  This past year, the theme was Disaster Planning and Recovery.  The EL team reviewed worldwide resources—freely available on the Internet—related to disaster planning and response, and compiled them in a single place.  This compilation is the completed project. The EL team started it in January 2016, and completed it by ALA Annual in June 2016. The completed project was advertised on several IRRT communication channels and in-person at the ALA Annual Conference in Orlando where the EL team presented two poster sessions and was featured at the IRRT’s Monday evening reception (over 500 attendees). The completed project can be seen here: https://sites.google.com/site/irrtfreelinks/