COSWL Cause

COSWL met this morning at 8:00am in the Washington Convention Center room 149A. It was a shorter meeting, but we still covered a lot of ground.

We returned to the discussion of the Anaheim program, further fleshing out our proposal and discussing potential panel options.

We followed up on our experience with the booth in the vendor area. Everyone who staffed it said that they felt it was a really good experience. We discussed possible partnerships for the booth in the future and different items that we could give away to people who stop by.

On a more administrative end we discussed the different reports that need to go in to ALA, and agreed that this reporting is important to show that COSWL is still busy, even when there's not a controversial issue in the news.

Theresa Tobin from the Feminist Task Force discussed the joint research project among FTF, ACRL's WSS, and COSWL. This project is to evaluate the gender breakdown of presenters at conferences to see if the male/female ratio matches that of the profession.

We also discussed library publications that emphasize men as business-like and assertive while they show women in softer roles and passively. This is an issue that we will explore further.

As always, we welcome comments and suggestions from you about gender issues in librarianship that you'd like to see us address. We'd also like to know if we're addressing areas you're concerned about. Let us know in the comments!