librarian.net

You know how there are people who like to act like they know what they’re talking about, but sometimes don’t really know what they are talking about? This happens with technology issues a lot. I have students who will report to me “And then I clicked on the Microsoft and the Internet turned off and I got an error saying ‘Can not find it’ but then it started to go again.” They sincerely believe they are communicating their tech support issues to me, but to my ear they are speaking gibberish. I can usually untangle the meaning with a few well-placed questions however. This is also the case with the ALA press release hyping the 2006 election and the electronic voting procedure they are forever refining. I am concerned that neither the person who wrote this press release, nor anyone else who read it before it was sent out and posted on the web site, knows the difference between an email address and a domain name.

My ALA Council term is up next year. Originally I intended not to run again because I was going to be out of the country. Now I’m not intending to run again because I’d rather work in highly fulfilling low-paying jobs at home and not worry about saving money and time to make two week-long trips per year to cities I’ve already been to. I also don’t like institutional politicking as much as I thought I might. I was very happy to do it for three years. One of the best parts of Council meetings was getting to sit next to Jenna and talk about what was going on and our crazy librarian hopes and dreams. She’s on the nominating committee and has prepared a little page about why you should consider running. If you’re interested, get in touch with her. If you have questions, feel free to run them by me. [eli]

List of other councilors elected, from the same press release. Congrats everyone.

Khafre K. Abif
Monika Antonelli
Toni Bernardi
Kathleen E. Bethel
Mary Biblo
Nick Buron
Audra Caplan
Barbara Cole
Diedre (Dee) Conkling
Julie A. Cummins
Kathy East
Randall Enos
Barbara A. Genco
Dee Gwaltney
Ling Hwey Jeng
Wei Jeng-Chu
Erlene Bishop Killeen
Margaret L. Kirkpatrick
Charles E. Kratz
Bonnie Kunzel
Kathy Lehman
Rory Litwin
David Loertscher **
Mary Long
Peter Mcdonald
Michael J. Miller
Toni Negro
Sylvia Norton *
Ana-Elba Pavon
Virginia Sanchez
Jan Sanders **
Sherrie Schmidt
Barbara K. Stripling
Theresa A. Tobin
Lisa Von Drasek
Ann Carlson Weeks

33 to be elected for 2005-2008
2 to be elected for 2005-2007**
1 to be elected for 2005-2006*

I haven’t spoken much about who I’m voting for in the ALA Elections because I suspect only a very small subset of you care, and because I haven’t even gotten my ballot yet. That said, Library Juice has two lists of picks from people who I generally agree with politically. If you are a voter in the ALA elections, vote for people you know, don’t just use all your votes because you have them. Bullet voting makes each vote count every so slightly more. Leslie Burger is my pick for president, but then again I voted for Michael Gorman.

ALA Elections are starting this week. I’ve requested a paper ballot again this year just to see how things work for the less technologically adept. The vendor running the elections is distributing all the emails with the login/password combinations for voting [yes, you read that right, passwords in email] over the next week to keep people from reading their email and then going to vote all at once, thus overloading the server, according to email we got on the Council list. Only one candidate has a blog this year, Leslie Burger. You may remember that the candidate without a blog last year was Michael Gorman.