Don Wood has put together a very nice list of links to ALA’s Intellectual Freedom documents.
Category: ala
I [want to] love libraries
Many people have worked hard on ALA’s I Love Libraries website. I know this because I was (in a small way) one of them.The site was advertised in the State of America’s Libraries published by ALA in April but didn’t go live until this week, just in time for Annual. In the intervening time we got what can only be described as a sub-par “coming soon” page which is really amazing to me considering that the URL had already been widely distributed.
I don’t see much need to pick apart the website page by page, but I do have some critiques that I hope will be illustrative or helpful.
1. Who didn’t learn anything about long URLs? ALA didn’t. There is no reason in 2007 to have that much extra junk in a URL.
2. In 2007, a “find your library” page should not go to a list of links of how you can find your library. It should go to a search box or a map.
3. Don’t hide your blog. Don’t bury new content at the bottom of your main page.
4. Things professional websites have that this one doesn’t: favicons, copyright statements in the footer or on the legal page not up top looking defensive, an overall design sensibility, content (not just links to content), an about us page with the names of real people on it, valid markup, alt text for images, accessible coding, valid security certificates, copyright statements that word wrap appropriately.
5. The rules for adding content to the Ilovelibraries.org Flickr group exclude humans and allow only institutions. Which 2.0 guideline does this violate? I asked to join. I never even heard back from the group moderator. Why is this restriction necessary?
In short, this is a 1.0 site that is pretending to be a 2.0 site and is a perfect example of how all the blogging tools in the world won’t make your organization responsive and interactive if your corporate culture is restrictive and controlling. Put another way, I’ve been clicking around this site for half an hour and I don’t even know what it’s trying to do. It’s all over the place. Is it to raise money for ALA and libraries in various ways? Is it a way to ask questions and get information about libraries? Is it a way to share content and/or my love of libraries with other people? Is it a way to push ALA content at more than the usual suspects? Is it a way to make ALA seem hipper and more “with it”? The about this site page is unrevealing: “Simply put, you love libraries, and we hope this Web site will keep it that way!” Huh.
I feel like if we could understand why ALA thinks ilovelibraries.org is a good, well-designed website for achieving their goals, we might understand more about why people have a hard time with technology and why there is such a digital divide in librarianship, much less among the public at large. For now it remains a bit of a mystery, at least to me.
Not going to ALA
I forgot to mention here, I won’t be at ALA. I was planning to go. In fact I may still be on the schedule but my dear friends decided to get married in Brooklyn that same exact weekend and the choice between paying my own way to DC to be on a panel and paying my own way to NY to be at a wedding was pretty clear-cut. Close readers will note that this is the second time that I’ve passed up Annual to go to a wedding. It must be a popular weekend.
There are a few neat things going on that people should go to. The Hollywood Librarian premiere Friday night (trailer, behind the scenes video). I’d link you to the ALA press release about this but their search form is broken, as is their contact form. My friend Pete, a librarian who works at MediaMatters, is DJing a dance night with some other folks on Saturday night. No cover, no dress code, lots of librarians. More details here. I look forward to reading about the conference on the bazllion blogs covering it.
choosing your battles and choosing your professional associations
Karen Coombs talks about a reaction she had a while back to a comment on her blog where she was considering her commitment to the Texas Library Association. I think for many busy librarians the question of how much to participate in how many professional associations is one that we have to continually revisit. There is also the related question of how long you need to try at something before you decide it’s not working and moving on to trying something else.
After I cycled off ALA Council, I decided that I wanted to step back some and spend sometime reacquainting with my local library association in Vermont, so I didn’t renew my ALA membership. I joined VLA at the conference — where I gave two talks, or I gave half of two talks — which meant that my annual fee will only pay for seven months of membership (all memberships expire on 31dec. That said, membership is cheap). I didn’t feel obligated to join since I’m not technically a librarian for my job but I felt it would be a good idea. Before I officially joined, I was still receiving the newsletter and I was on the mailing list, so I’m not sure what joining technically gets me except the ability to be elected to an office which is not something I’m seriously considering at this point. I joined a committee — the advocacy committee — but had a difficult time making the meetings that were scheduled a few weeks in advance all over the state. Most meetings at VLA seem to happen in person. My speciality is, as you know, online communications and tools so a lot of what I had to offer the committee — custom RSS feeds and news filters, custom email addresses, web site updates, blog creation, “email your legislature”, setting up little websites — were all sort of outside the range of what we were considering and no one on the committee had access to the VLA website to make changes to it. I did manage to get the Library Value Calculator up on the website, but it involved a few days of work just getting that to happen and when it was announced on the list, my name wasn’t mentioned. This is a world I am getting used to.
Meredith has written a little bit about our experiences working with VLA. Unlike in a giant organization like TLA, I know most of the members of VLA either personally or by sight. It’s a tiny state. Membership is up from the high 200’s to about 400 now which is pretty exciting. I had a great time at the conference and I introduced myself personally to the incoming president who I heard had some bold new ideas for getting the word out about the importance of libraries (making the newsletter not a perk for members only, ditching the print newsletter in favor of a digital one, using email and blogs for communicating, more online communication and tools etc). What I told her, which is true, was that I’m not blessed in the tact department but if there is a computer or technological problem that needs fixing, I’m one of the more capable library people in the state to do it. The VLA conference allowed me to meet a few more people in the state who are also capable and techie and I have a slow but inexorable plan to Make Things Work Well. I’ll check back in next year and let you know how it’s gone.
The State of America’s Libraries, from ALA, April 2007
ALA has published The State of America’s Libraries (pdf link), a 17 page report about what libraries in the US are up to and how they’re doing. Actually it’s more like how ALA is doing. There are a lot of people lately telling us what’s up with libraries and technology. The Gates Foundation likes to say we’re all getting wired and all getting the help we need if we’re not wired. I wonder about their results sometimes and I’m curious about ALA’s. They say a lot of what you’d expect. Despite the title, this is almost entirely about US libraries, though there is mention of Montreal’s new building.
According to the executive report: Library use is up up up, even at “one-room rural outposts” which are then contrasted with the “spectacular” Seattle Public building. I work in a rural outpost and let me tell you, no one likes to think of themselves as an outpost and the people who live there certainly don’t see their one-room library that way. Perhaps I’m touchy. Investment in e-books is up which is hardly surprising since they’re still fairly new as “book technologies” go. It’s also fairly concerning since e-books are rarely owned, often just rented. What does this mean for the actual capital of American’s libraries? Are we owning less but paying more? Additionally, people are still reading books (amazing!) I bet we will never see the ALA report that even implies that people aren’t reading as much as they used to, no matter how the numbers have to bend to support this. School libraries are still dealing with funding headaches.
The library community is still defending its users against intrusive government and censorship challenges. They don’t mention how many libraries and library systems have installed or enhanced filters that restrict access, but this number is pretty important too, and totally absent from the document. The report itself states that it’s only a “highlights” report which sort of contrasts with the title, but that’s not terrifically surprising. A few other observations and some pullquotes.
– We’re still measuring “visits” when we talk about who is going to the library. As near as I can tell a “visit” does not include a trip to the website or interaction with the library that does not occur inside the library building. For all of our 2.0 talking we’re still not totally validating “outside the box” library interactions at our highest levels. Huh. There is no mention of website statistics of public libraries at all. This has to change, and change quick. I think one thing that could rapidly change the way we think about libraries is if we would collect these sorts of numbers with the traditional library data we collect. Make libraries report their website statistics and maybe they’ll start looking at the website as a real library service. If we’re so techie now, why don’t we do this?
– “Virtually all (99 percent) U.S. public libraries now provide free public computer access to the Internet” 99% is a nice big number, but that would mean in Vermont we have two or three libraries that don’t offer this access. I wonder what their story is? I wonder how we can help them?
– “Academic libraries explored new virtual ways of providing services using technologies such as blogs, wikis, avatars, YouTube, Facebook, etc.” I know this is nitpicky, but this is a very short paragraph in a long document that dedicated nearly a page to “visits.” Where are the stats for this statement? It’s as easy or easier to track contacts in YouTube, for example. Why aren’t we seeing those numbers? If we want social tools to move beyond flavor-of-the-month status, we have to treat social tool interactions as “real” library interactions. Also, the mishmash of technologies, tools, and plain old nouns (avatars?) in this list implies strongly that whoever wrote this was either pressed for space or unclear on the concepts. Where is IM?
– Don’t miss this conclusion they draw when discussing the school library shortages: “Often the cuts in school libraries are being linked to the key requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation.” While using the weak verb “are being linked” is a bit of a cop out, we are seeing that schools which are short of funding are having to channel that funding into getting the numbers required by No Child Left Behind and away from general educational resources like the library. The impact of this is felt disproportionately by poor and rural areas. This is shameful.
– Salaries rose but there is no indication if they rose ahead of or behind inflation and cost of living. We’d know more, but further data is contained in an ALA-APA report which you can’t get without paying for.
– Serials expenditures are up 273% While the report implies that this is because libraries are buying hard copy and electronic versions of the same titles, it’s more likely that libraries are simply being gouged by vendors who have mysterious pricing rubrics that seem more based on ability to pay than any cost of delivering or preparing services. Why aren’t we more critical of this number? Why aren’t we more critical of this disturbing trend?
– They mention Ilovelibraries.org. My impression from hearing about it: someone is not learning the “don’t make your website a destination, become part of a community” lesson from the 2.0 world. My impression on clicking that link: embarassed as all hell. It’s marketing 101 to not announce a website before it’s ready to go live. The fact that this isn’t done by National Library Week is clearly a case of someone dropping the ball or terribly misjudging how long it takes to make a project like this go live. The “we’re not ready” page could have been a nice savvy page that made people smile and maybe even bookmark it. Instead it shows a lack of attention and respect for my time. I typed in a URL I read in their report (a non-hyperlinked URL I read in an HTML document, geez) and it looks like someone didn’t even care enough to spend 30 minutes to make a nice page with margins and maybe a box to put the text in. It’s 2007, we expect more from the web.
– 80% of US libraries are rural. I have no idea how they arrived at that number or what it means. By population? By number of buildings? It’s almost impossible that 80% of Americans are served by rural libraries, so what is going on? I assume they mean buildings.
– Spectrum Scholarships are up. This is great. Thanks to IMLS for providing addtional grant moneys to put more students into this great program.
– The ALA came out against DOPA. This is good news. However, their stated position “DOPA, as written in the House in 2006, leads to a false sense of security while over-blocking constitutionally protected material.” They stress the business uses of social tools and other “legitimate purposes” which I think glosses over 1) there is nothing wrong with social networking generally, nothing at all. It’s no less safe than the mall. 2) just because something is used in a social sense doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value and shouldn’t be overlegislated by scaremongers who don’t understand it. I wish ALA had a more savvy response to DOPA, but I am happy they came out against it.
– The ALA is trying to attract more libraries to the E-Rate program so that they can get funding for technology. This is good. However, we all know that E-rate money comes with filtering strings attached. This is bad. Libraries should be able to make their own choices about what sort of access they provide to the Internet.
– Three sentences on Google. Eesh.
So, the news is good, generally. The ALA is looking medium-clueful which is up from not-at-all-clueful a few years ago, but there’s still clearly work to be done.