Sunday, July 29, 2007 5pm. NYCAHN office, Brooklyn.

In attendance: Emily, Jenna, Jonathan, Melissa
Regrets due to traffic or weather: Alycia, John, Susie

Informal Overview
Since we had a new guy, we chatted a bit about what we do--the local collective and the main group.

Volunteer Projects
A member wrote to Jenna asking about library friendly volunteer opportunities, like Books Through Bars or teaching information literacy skills at a Y or somewhere. That got us to thinking we should make a list of such ideas for the local site. Also that we might contact local groups, especially unions, that might be interested in the kind of training sessions we could offer. Jenna will see if she can get a contact at the Lower East Side Girls Club and SEIU, Emily with another union(?), and Melissa will check with NYCAHN.

While we were on the topics of creating a web resource for volunteer opportunities and resources for unions and nonprofits, we figured we should update and expand our statistics pathfinder.

We also have one more immediate volunteer opportunity, the 100 Question Challenge Science-A-Thon, which is partially just a fun favor to do for a local science teacher. Once Jenna gets the questions from Sarah, she will email the list and see if she can find 9 other volunteers to take 10 questions each to fact check. We may also have stuff to do the day of. The organizers thought it might be fun to have librarians "judging" the contest, which is Saturday, September 15 from 10-2:30 in Union Square Park.

USSF Report Back
Melissa brought materials from the event to show: the program, info about the Media Center, and a newspaper that promoted the open source/tech events, one of which was ours.

The Rad Ref/Interactivist talk went well, and there should be a video of it floating around somewhere.

Mel also did some work and a training at the Ida B. Wells Media Justice Center, which was meant to equalize the various presses and their relationship with their subjects (e.g. "poverty scholars," per Poor magazine, people who have expertise in the area of poverty because unlike those reporting it, they have lived it).

We would like to put the survey up on the web, at least to tabulate the results, but perhaps also to get more responses. Some discussion of removing demographic questions.

Next Meeting
We'll talk about the September meeting, which will be open. One proposed topic for the open meeting is books to prisoners projects. (BTB, PREP, Fordham law students, etc.)

Perhaps we'll meet in the garden near Gretchen in August?