by Tim Wojcik
At the recent Georgia Libraries Conference 2020, Laura Burtle recognized the efforts of Ashley Dupuy with the annual GLA Presidential Commendation. The commendation is described, in part, in this quote from the award announcement:
This year has been challenging, as you all know. Ashley has worked tirelessly, moving our administration to Impact, moving our membership database, setting up our incorporation, moving our listserv, and so much more. – Laura Burtle
Ashley Dupuy had these thoughts to a few questions I posed to her about this marvelous recognition.
TW: What was an unexpected aspect of one of the challenges you faced. (And how you resolved the issue.)
AD: Getting GSuite up and running was a lot of work. We could not have done it without the expertise of Daniel Zeiger from the Georgia Public Library Service. He helped with creating the account and the initial setup. There were also a lot of decisions that had to be made and Laura Burtle was a great partner in working out all of the small details.
TW: • How did Covid-19 affect the amount of labor involved in getting the task completed. Did the virus enable some time saving opportunities?
AD: • Covid-19 was not really an issue for my work this year as most of the GLA work that I do is virtual anyway. The Executive Board Meetings are now done online and that has actually been great. We’ve had more participation since not everyone can travel to the meeting when it’s in person. GSuite has been a wonderful bonus for GLA. We now have GLA email addresses and Google Drives where we can store internal documents. In the past we’ve had issues with institutional memory and information retrieval, so having an intranet for our files is going to be very helpful.
TW: Any thoughts about the visual dissonance of the Georgia Library Association address in Madison, Wisconsin?
AD: • Unfortunately the address cannot be helped. We’ve tried to have P.O. Boxes in Georgia but it’s just too expensive to forward mail. The company we contract for our administrative services is called Impact Administrative Services and is located in Wisconsin. They are the ones who process our payments and member information so the mail needs to be sent to them. Because we’ve moved to an online Membership Portal that takes credit cards, we hope to limit the amount of physical mail we need to receive.
Ashley, thanks for your efforts on behalf of GLA!
Ashley Dupuy is the Department Chair of Public Services/Librarian Associate Professor at Kennesaw State University.