[WEB4LIB] New Directions

[K.G. Schneider]

>        Two years ago, many of you marked my name on the ALA Council
> ballot with the expectation that I would represent your views, values,
> and priorities.  Last week I decided that, because of my higher personal
> costs associated with attending conferences, and because I have
> college-age children, I will be unable to attend conferences this year.
> With regret, I resigned my position as councilor-at-large and ALA
> Council representative to the Planning & Budget Assembly, as well as
> American Libraries Advisory Committee member.

Skip is exactly the kind of person I like working with in ALA: sensible,
thoughtful, hard-working. He laughed at the idea that he might participate
in the work of the association without leaving his office. But as I said to
him, the capability is there. We could do this if we wanted to. However, to
quote my favorite lightbulb joke (where the question is, "How many
therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?"), first, the lightbulb has
to really want to change.

To give a "web-for-libraries" spin to this, be aware that for some time
there has been discussion within ALA governance about participating in ALA
electronically. Quite a bit of ALA governance is predicated on a
mid-20th-century model where we show up twice a year to do the "work" of the
association. Most of the work seems to be on the order of a pyramid scheme,
where we vote on actions developed at the conference that lead to more
actions to vote on in six months. A surprising amount of ALA activity
revolves around this reality, and it is this reality--show up at ALA, do
work, go home, repeat--that means that most of the actual governance
activity of ALA is hidden from member view, because since the committees
that generate the work Council votes on must first meet so that Council has
something to do, the bulk of the governance decisions takes place after most
of the conference attendees have long gone home. (This is much less true for
LITA and for some divisions, such as PLA.)

Not only that, to mollify those who have been insisting that ALA move from
hoop skirts to comfortable slacks, ALA has developed a category of "virtual"
committee member that trivializes the entire concept of participation.
"Virtual" members can "participate," but their presence does not count
toward a quorum and they cannot vote on committee actions. ALA is unable to
consider the idea that someone might be a vital member of a committee and
not fly cross-country twice a year to attend a conference. Personally, I
find the entire category of "virtual" member to belittle and demean the
concept of association participation and make our association appear
exceptionally backward. I am also unimpressed by the circular reasoning that
"a committee, etc., could find itself without a quorum and unable to act if
all of its virtual members and some of its other members were not present at
a meeting at Annual or Midwinter." This is predicated on the idea that it's
only work if it happens at conference. 

At this point in the discussion, someone usually invokes the Open Meeting
Rule. I don't know how ALA can argue that its meetings are "open" when 2/3s
of its members aren't at the conferences in the first place. Additionally,
the answers for opening meetings are simple--make ALA discussions more
visible and invite people to observe them. (ALA is planning to implement
some "virtual community" software, but we've had the ability to allow people
to follow discussions all along, much as anyone who wants to can follow the
discussion on Web4Lib. It just isn't that big of a deal.)

And to really frost this cupcake, for years I have been asking ALA to go a
step farther with participation, but I am uniformly ignored. At ALA Council,
we already pay to have our live discussion transcribed, keyed into a
computer, and output on a screen in almost-real-time. This expensive but
worthy activity is done to enable hearing-challenged members to follow
Council discussions. I have done the legwork to verify that we could go one
tiny step farther, and at very little additional cost, allow these real-time
discussions to be presented on the Web. The expensive, difficult work of
keying them in is already happening. Going a step farther to place live
transcripts online is inexpensive and easy. The objections to this have
bordered on contradictorily foolish (the transcripts aren't "reliable"--but
they're good enough for deaf members of ALA?) to laughable (if we offer
Council discussion on the Web, people will stay home because they don't have
to go to ALA to sit in on the discussion--oh yeah, we DO get SRO crowds for
the reading of the latest Leg Comm report). 

The real reason this kind of suggestion is ignored is that, to borrow a
favorite bumper sticker, it subverts the dominant paradigm. It doesn't
matter how valuable Skip is to the association, or how much work he is
willing to do. If you can't be there on terms established in the late 19th
century, you don't count. If we had the transcripts online, it would
eventually occur to some that Skip, following the discussion, might be able
to vote on Council actions, perhaps by phone or email. And we couldn't have
that. (Someone actually said, "but how would he get the documents?"--this,
minutes after we received our first batch of Council documents by, of
course, email.) 

There are a few voices within ALA governance pushing for change. My guess is
most of you either route around the sillier parts of ALA by participating in
divisions that meet your personal or professional needs (e.g., by joining
LITA, which has terrific interest groups in every imaginable tech-related
area, an excellent annual Forum, and great collegiality), or by ignoring ALA
altogether. 

I suspect the real difference between the "Nextgen" librarians and us old
codgers is that the young'uns are much less interested in ALA's head games
and can find other means of interacting without donning bustles and sleeve
garters, and if I'm right, those demographics will come home to roost in the
next decade. 


Karen G. Schneider
Grimly trudging through her third term on ALA Council &
Writing strictly on her own recognizance