Betsy Blankenship, Ohio State University Marion

I’ve busy working with my committee on the 2013 ALAO conference and the many details. We are making progress and hope to have more information out soon. We will be visiting the conference site on March 1.
I’ve also begun to plan for the annual ALAO Leadership Retreat to be held, July 15-16, 2013. This is an important time for newly-elected officers to get oriented to their new positions and for the board as a whole to plan for ALAO activities, review our mission and objectives, and to develop new goals for the coming year. I hope that many of you consider running for an office; the board is a great place to participate in ALAO!
I’m still working on compiling past ALAO awards winners. If you’ve won an award of any type and want to let me know when it was and what it was for, please feel free to email me at blankenship.5@osu.edu. In the process of identifying award winners, I’ve been reviewing past ALAO Newsletters. How fascinating it has been to see how our Interest Groups have developed and became official. It was great see how the Diversity Committee evolved from an interest group and began awarding the student diversity scholarship. Did you know that the Support Staff Interest Group (SSIG) was our first officially recognized interest group?