At the time of writing, I have just registered and booked flights and hotel for the first in-person EAHIL event in two years, and I think the whole EAHIL community is keeping their fingers crossed we're going to be able to go ahead as planned this time. The conference will take place in Rotterdam, the Netherlands 1-3 June, and has the inspiring overall theme BROADEN THE HORIZONS - diversity, partnership, and innovation with a human touch. Since there might be remaining difficulties in travelling and perhaps less funding than usual due to the pandemic, those unable to attend in person there will have the opportunity to participate digitally the week after the conference. For more information about the conference and how to attend, please check the conference website: https://eahil2022.nl/.
Apart from the important networking with colleagues that takes place when you meet in person, the disruptions caused by the pandemic also seems to have had a negative influence on the possibility to attract submissions for the annual events, as well as original papers for publication in the Journal of EAHIL. In my understanding, this is probably due to extra pressure on libraries to support health care in handling the pandemic, but also because it's been much more challenging to develop your operations and services when you work from home and only meet your co-workers and patrons digitally, leaving less content to present at conferences or as a journal article.
Updated Code of Conduct for EAHIL
In connection with preparations for the Rotterdam conference, the question of a Code of conduct for the event was raised by the Local Organising Committee. EAHIL has a Code of Ethics for members, available on our website, approved by the General Assembly in Köln in 2002. During winter 2021/2022, a subgroup of the EAHIL Executive Board has updated the Code of Ethics, modernizing the text, adding statements on diversity and sustainability, etc. Hopefully, the General Assembly will approve the revised Code of Ethics in Rotterdam in June.
Election year
Every second year is an election year for EAHIL. This means that in spring 2022, there will be an election for the Board, this time with four open positions: President (2023-2024), one full member (2023-2026) and two co-opted members (2023-2024). The results will be presented at the General Assembly in June in Rotterdam.
Later in 2022, there will also be an election for the EAHIL Council. The Council is an advisory group for the Board and acts as a link between the members in their country and the Association. Council members have an important role in publicizing EAHIL and recruiting new members. Councillors are elected for four years by the voting EAHIL members resident in their country. Each member state of the Council of Europe is eligible to elect councillors if at least five voting members are based in the country. Depending on the number of members, a country is allowed 1-3 councillors.
Membership issues
EAHIL is run entirely voluntarily, there is no secretariat to assist with administrative tasks to run the Association, but all tasks are distributed among Board members. An essential task is that of systems administrator, who runs discussion lists, file share, membership database etc. The EAHIL membership database was created several years ago and needs to be replaced by a more modern web-based solution for easier administration. In preparation for migrating to new software for our membership database in 2022, the EAHIL systems administrators have been working to clean and update the current membership database. It turned out that we had many outdated e-mail addresses on record, which means that we're unable to reach those members. When the possibility to update your account was closed on 1 December, after numerous attempts to localize and contact members who hadn't updated their account, the result was a more than 50 % decrease in active members, from 2094 members in 2021 to 983 in 2022.
This decrease will directly influence the Council elections later in 2022 since the number of Council members for each country is based on the total number of members in that country. It has also raised the topic of membership in general among Board members. Since the Association is run by volunteers, we are dependent on having active members interested in getting involved as Council or Board members, and not the least in arranging the yearly events. Attracting new members will be a hot topic for discussion at the Council meeting in Rotterdam.