Coming in through the out Door

Abstract

There’s a rock group that sings a song called ‘‘In Through the Out Door.’’ Not that I’m a fan of theirs, but I thought of it recently as I prepare to rotate off the ALA’s board of directors and as your outgoing president. What’s so ‘‘in’’ about being ‘‘out’’? Well, if you haven’t looked around lately, there’s a tremendous amount of progress that your board of directors has made during the past two years. And it’s progress that is bound to reshape and revamp ALA for many years to come. Let’s start from an organizational point of view. For the first time in our history, we have a professional and experienced chief administrative officer running the organization. Greg Dummer has made an immediate and strong impact in elevating the way ALA runs itself and in enhancing our value to members and to the industry. Under Greg’s leadership, we have built a capable staff organization to support our members and our leadership initiatives. Once run almost solely by volunteers, ALA now has a very experienced group of professionals guiding our professional affairs. Then there are programmatic achievements that have occurred, all geared to better serving the community of laboratory automation professionals. These include: A new agreement with Elsevier to publish the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA). Our goal is to make JALA the premier journal in the field of laboratory automation.