In the credit where credit is due department. Meredith Farkas informs us that ALA is taking some ownership and offering some branding (and I’m not sure what else, clearly not server space) to the ALA Conference wiki which has become a regularly anticipated conference supplement, terrifically helpful to those of us who like informal recommendations about the area we’re visiting. I printed out many pages of restaurant suggestions when I was in San Antonio and they were really helpful. [thanks walt]
Tag: ala
ala elections: thoughts, entreaties and warnings
Karen Schneider uploaded a picture of the postcard that ALA members willl be getting alerting them to the email that will be coming which gives them instructions for how to vote online. While I find this process cumbersome, the online voting has improved markedly in the past few years. It’s hard to get such a large bunch of non-techie people to do something online. And it’s very hard when those people are voting in different numbers and combinations of elections. Of course, if this were a Web 2.0 scenario, there would be a button on the main page of the ALA website that would say “You haven’t voted yet….” which would link directly to the balloting system and disappear once you had completed voting. Here are a few other thoughts I had about an online voting scenario in my dream world.
- Maybe it would indicate your status if you were partiallly through voting.
- There would be a way to get your voting password emailed to you by answering a security question online.
- No one would even suggest that you get help with online voting via fax.
- Candidates would campaign online and could embed URLs and photos in their profiles.
- You would be able to sort candidates by state of residence, professional affiliation, gender, or other criteria.
- Advocacy groups could link to profiles of their preferred candidates when picking their slates.
- Bios would have realtime hit counts on pages.
- You would be able to view your ballot and the candidate bios easily in separate tabs or panels of the same browser window.
- Submitting and checking your ballots would be simple, requiring a click or at most two.
- There would be a status page showing how many people had voted via electronic and paper ballots.
- This page would be updated in real time and would be shown as a percentage of the eligible voters of ALA.
- Election results would be available online as soon as polls had closed and paper ballots were tabulated.
- Results would come with handy graphs showing percentages and total vote counts for every election, even the ones you didn’t vote in personally.
- Results would link back to the candidate bios so you could learn about who was now in governance. Press releases anouncing winners of every election would be sent to appropriate media outlets. I could go on and on.
At some level I’m partial to the town meeting style of governance which should come as no surprise. I also know that it becomes impractical when dealing with groups the size of ALA. I just want the evolution of electronic elections at ALA to not come to a grinding halt just because we’ve got something online that works.
A membership dues increase is on the ballot, for example. There was a lot of discussion at Council meetings in Texas that Council needed to be “speaking with one voice” about the necessity of the 30% increase, to be phased in over three years. I think the idea of speaking with one voice on something we are all asked to vote on undermines the idea of why you have a representative democracy in the first place, but I’m touchy about money. At the same time, I understand why ALA needs more money. Please vote, and ask me or your favorite ALA representative if there’s something you don’t understand. You can even do it by fax.
ALA – value vs. return
My last Council meeting as an At Large Councilor is in New Orleans. When I’m at home, I say “Good riddance!” but when I’m in Council meetings, especially if something worthwhile is happening that I feel a part of, I feel proud to serve. The committment to service is one of the things that I really enjoy about my membership in ALA, but I think that’s more about me and my priorities than ALA. ALA gives me a good place to be a helper at a national level. Meredith was over for dinner last weekend and we talked about ALA, among other things. I can’t say that’s what sparked this long and passionate post of hers about ALA [with some follow-up by Dorothea here] , but I know that some of the topics ring very true to me as well. My issues in specific are what I perceive to be the relatively lax standards in library school accreditation and the misrepresentation of the current job market both of which are contributing to a glutted market and a lot of fresh-out-of-school students who are having a hard time finding work at the same time as ALA is hiking their dues by 30% over three years.
And, of course, the web site. I completely accept the “Mistakes were made.” reasoning for why the site is the way it is. What I don’t understand is the absolute lack of anyone seeming to try to make it better, now. Basic things like shorter URLs, accessbility issues like ALT and title tags, and clearer navigation don’t need to wait for a redesign to be slowly added and implemented site-wide. We’re still seeing URLs like this one for one of the main pages on the site, broken links like the ones down the side of this page (B Roll, Downloadable Photos, Contacts, Feedback) and a 404 page that refers to the “new” website and instructs you to email someone who will get back to you within a week. The Member and Customer Service center link in the footer to a sitemap page and the FAQ (which you can get to by going to ala.org/faq, but the “cite this page” link says otherwise) talks about the next conference occurring in January 2006. ALA does a lot of things right, don’t get me wrong, but their sites seem designed and populated with content by people who do not use the web. When PayPal is the dominant way of paying for things online, the ALA Online Donation form looks like this. Library 2.0 is all about continual feedback and improvement, not this sort of “let’s make a list of everything that’s wrong and fix it when we do the redesign.” It’s not normal for a lot of library professionals to be continually evaluating and tweaking, but that’s what maintaining always-on presence requires.
The question remains, how to you serve a completely diverse group of information professionals, some of whom don’t even own a computer and others who maintain elaborate online communities and are involved in creating the next generation of library technology? I have no idea. I can sort of gesture in an “Ug, ug.” way and point to who I think is doing it right, and similarly indicate who I think is doing things wrong. I can join governing bodies and try to put in my $.02 and hope that I see change in my lifetime. I live in a rural area, I’m not against change coming slowly. On the other hand, when you know change comes slowly and you see the lumbering steamship that is ALA coming to a fork in the road and teeter on the brink of, say, another bad website design, or more public statements about the librarian shortage, well I just feel that I have to say something.
changes in the blogosphere
Sarah, the Librarian in Black, has a new job. Karen, the Free Range Librarian, is dealing with some funding challenges at her place of work and has stepped down from ALA Council so that she can focus on work and life stuff. This has sparked more interesting discussion about the value of ALA versus peoples’ ability to substantively participate if they have limited time or financial resources. Michael from Tame the Web is condo shopping outside of Chicago, and I’ve been looking into some interesting job options for when the tech mentoring stuff wraps up in September.
See you at PLA?
I will be blogging for PLA as a regular old PLA blogger and hopefully doing some updates here on my own time. Anyone who will be in Boston Tues-Sun [if you live there, or especially if you’re just visiting] please look me up. I’m going to the conference in Boston but staying with my sister in Somerville. Unlike most conferences, I’m not overcommitted, so let’s get together.