project vote smart and libraries

If you’re a library that is getting a strange letter from Project Vote Smart talking about lack of support from ALA, please read these messages from ALA President Michael Gorman and ALA Executive Director Keith Fiels. Upshot, they claim they are forced to “…no longer provide materials to libraries because they had tried for five months, unsuccessfully, to get a letter of endorsement from ALA leadership.” Gorman: “I have never received a request for an endorsement.” Fiels: “[I]t was never clear to me from based on the conversations with Ms. Buscaglia what exactly she needed from ALA or that the funding for the project depended on a letter from the President. Of course we would have provided a letter of support.” I can’t imagine what happened here.

ALA Election Finals

The ALA elections are over. 14,441 people voted. The new ALA President Elect is Loriene Roy. The dues increase passed by a fairly close margin. The new incoming Councilors At Large are Rosie L. Albritton, Cassandra G. Barnett, Beth E. Bingham, Carolyn Sue Brodie, Kate Ann Corby, Bob R. Diaz, Heidi W. Dolamore, David L. Easterbrook, Ann Dutton Ewbank, Amy Gonzalez Ferguson, Nancy Fredericks, Carolyn P. Giambra, Michael A. Golrick, Michael Gutierrez, Rochelle L. Hartman, Beth K. Hill, Dora T. Ho, Patricia M. Hogan, Dennis J. LeLoup, Ginny B. Moore, Andrea M. Morrison, Ria Elizabeth Newhouse, Nancy C. Pack , Jo Ann Pinder, Ellen M. Riordan, Larry Romans, Frances R. Roscello, Mark C. Rosenzweig, Gail A. Schlachter, Barbara Silverman, Margie J. Thomas, Shixing Wen and Nancy P. Zimmerman. More election results are on this page and Michael has the numbers for the At Large Councilor votes.

for the ALA inclined

Two notable posts for people even a little involved in ALA.

  • Leslie Burger reports on the situation in New Orleans, now just a few months before the annual conference scheduled to be there. As someone who went to Toronto during the SARS scare and enjoyed the lack of super-crowding (great for me, not so great for exhibitors) it will be interesting to see what this conference brings. And, on a related note, how nice is it to read a first hand report of what things look like down there that isn’t all press-releasey and absent any real information? This is the sort of things blogs are good at. This puts a compassionate and approachable face on ALA.

    You can’t stay away from New Orleans. You must witness first hand the destruction of nature and the failure of government to take care of its people. It is an American tragedy and who better to bear witness and tell the story than librarians. These people need our help, they need our money, they need our support. Now more than ever before you have a reason to attend an ALA conference.

  • Speaking of, my friend Michael Golrick is floating the idea of a Bloggers Roundtable at ALA. All we’d need is a hundred people and I don’t think this is much of a stretch. I’ve been a member of the Social Responsibilities Round Table on and off since I first started being involved in professional associations and it was a great way for me to learn about ALA and professional involvement generally from a position where I felt like I was among friends, or at least colleagues with similar interests. The New Members Round Table serves this purpose for a lot of library students, but I bet a Bloggers Roundtable would serve a similar function. One of the things that has always surprised me is how much I feel like I have in common with other bloggers in the library world — even ones that have different jobs, different outlooks and different approaches than I do — and how collegial I feel with many of them. The blogger get-togethers that happen at conferences are often the high point of these conferences for me.

on speaking with one voice, too legit to quit

I’ve mentioned the “speaking with one voice” idea quite a lot. When you work with ALA in any capacity for long you’ll hear about it. Councilors were encouraged to all support the dues increase so that we could speak with one voice for ALA. The Social Responsibilities Round Table was discouraged from sending out copies of their own resolutions using their name (and by extention, ALA’s name) because of the supposed value of a “speaking with one voice” approach. When I worked at a reference desk, I tried hard to balance my own opinions on library policies with the binding nature of the policies, and the assumption that we were allowed to be flexible within the rules, to a degree, a degree I was never sure of (“Yes, I think the fines are a little high. No you should still pay them.”).

This just leads up to an anecdote. Last week the READ Poster I added to the Flickr group I mentioned a few weeks ago was selected to illustrate a little blurb about the Flickr group in AL Direct. AL Direct is an e-newsletter distributed by ALA. It’s distributed to all ALA members, except ones like me who have unsubscribed. I was a little surprised by the (unattributed) inclusion of my image both because it’s a bit icky and because it’s a direct rip-off of an ALA trademark. As I recall, when Audible came out with their Don’t Read campaign, ALA sent them a strongly worded letter.

I was a little surprised to see this post on LISNews about how to make your own legit READ posters. Apparently the gal from ALA called Blake about this item. I didn’t get specifics but it’s clear from the wording that

  • ALA would certainly prefer that you paid $134 for a set of templates. You can then import these into your own editing software and are subsequently licensed to use what you create, though you can’t sell anything you make with it.
  • The people at ALA Graphics are not “speaking with one voice” with the people from AL Direct. I am not suprised at this, since it’s a huge organization, and American Libraries is technically editorially independent, but it’s a little jarring nonetheless. From a business perspective, ALA has a legal responsibility to “defend” its trademark which in this case is the word READ, as indicated by the license agreement [text below] which has a whole bunch of other interesting points (one computer at a time, no “redistribution” of the image etc)

The word READ is a registered trademark of the American Library Association (ALA). With the purchase of this disc, ALA grants the purchaser a license to use the trademark, but only within the context of the images on the disc subject to the conditions below. ALA grants you a personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive right to transfer the images on the accompanying CD-ROM disc to one computer at a time and to use the images on that computer with one user, subject to the following terms and conditions. The images and layouts are for use only by registered non-profit purchasers only to enhance reading programs and to promote them. The images may not be incorporated in products offered for sale. An image(s) may not be incorporated in a product for the purpose of redistributing the image(s), and the images themselves may not be sold or rented, or downloaded or transferred electronically such as on an electronic network or bulletin board. Pornographic or defamatory use of the images is prohibited. You may not copy the disc in its entirety.

From my perspective, this is a “no harm, no foul” situation with the homemade READ Posters. However, the sudden presence of someone acting like a referee, essentially an agent from an advocacy organization tut-tutting a bunch of librarians for taking their good idea and running with it, makes me feel just a little bit shamed.

dear recent and upcoming library grads

Happy National Library Week! You’ll be happy to know that the librarian shortage has been pushed back another few years. You’ll be even happier to know that advances in health care combined with the rising costs of health care mean that librarians are living longer and keeping their jobs longer. While there are plenty of creative ways you can give your work away for free or for cheap, you might want to look at this as an opportunity to go back to school or maybe find a new hobby while you wait.

Seriously, this is not an April Fools post, though I wish it were. I just wanted to let you know that Michael McGrorty posted a message to the ALA Council list talking about the librarian job market and the odd juxtaposition of the Library Corps idea. I followed up with my own response which you might find interesting. Catch up on the whole thread here and hope people don’t get too turned off to the entire idea of librarianship with the post that followed mine.

In the meantime, if you need a bright spot among all this darkness, please enjoy the Rock n Roll Library video created especially for this week. Got anything else to share for NLW? Add it in the comments.