I’m happy to say that we’ve removed the login requirement to view the online archive of American Libraries, which includes all issues, including the current one, dating back to January 2003. The issues are available through ebrary, and you will need to download the ebrary reader if it’s your first visit.
We got support to open access from the American Libraries Advisory, Membership, and Publishing committees at Annual in Anaheim this year, and we’re doing it now to correspond with the first Open Access Day, to be observed tomorrow, October 14.
We’re also opening access to AL’s weekly newsletter, American Libraries Direct, which previously was limited to members as well. Nonmembers can now subscribe at www.ala.org/ala/alonline/aldirect/aldirect.cfm.
Why the membership requirement in the first place? I wasn’t here for the original conversations regarding the magazine, but as I understand it, it goes back to a perceived need to provide member-only benefits. More directly: those who made the decision were concerned members thought American Libraries was the only benefit they received for their membership, so if it becomes available for free, they have no need to remain members.
I can see a certain logic to that, even though I see a significant flaw in it: Even if it were true that AL is the only thing that members get for their membership, or if that were the widespread perception, locking down access doesn’t actually address either of those problems. It does, however (as many have commented) keep AL out of online conversations on blogs and other sites that can’t link to something if it’s locked behind password protection.
This still isn’t a perfect solution; as I mentioned, you do need to download the ebrary reader in order to view the archives. (And there’s a small incompatibility with Firefox 3, so if you use that browser, there’s an extra workaround you’ll have to do.) So I’m also pleased to be able to say that HTML is coming. January is our target date to start posting new issues in an HTML format.
I don’t plan on making this a regular occurrence, but I’d like to take an opportunity to plug an AL Focus video:
I’m sharing this for the content, not the cinematography (of which there’s more or less none). This is Stephen Chbosky, author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, reading a letter from one of his readers, at the Banned Books Read-Out in Chicago September 27.
That description really doesn’t do the video justice, though. It’s one of the most powerful arguments I’ve seen for keeping a book available—an utterly visceral approach to intellectual freedom, rather than a, well, intellectual one.
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:22 am by Leonard Kniffel
It’s been a rocky month, made unexpectedly rockier for American Libraries by a telephone call from Tom Hennen (just as the October issue of the magazine had mailed and the newly redesigned Chicago Tribune was arriving on my doorstep) informing me that he’d unwittingly used the wrong dataset to tabulate the latest edition of his HAPLR rankings. We immediately shifted into damage-control mode and began the process of apologizing and trying to set the record straight, an undertaking that continues into this issue.
I received my own October issue of American Libraries in the mail yesterday, and it only served to remind me that we would be trying to set this record straight for months, or at least until we can get the corrections into print. Although corrected pages are available for download on the AL website, and we issued a press release that went to all ALA members (who have e-mail addresses in their membership records) through American Libraries Direct, we cannot take back what we have put in print.
The next morning, I looked at the newly redesigned (and widely panned) Tribune, thought about HAPLR, and said to myself, “This is all wrong. Why is the newspaper trying to compete with the Web, trying to sound like a blog? What is the point of trying to force into print that which is most easily accessible, most practical and useful, and most easily and cheaply corrected online?” Things like statistical ranking tables. Granted, everyone involved with print publishing is trying to reinvent, repurpose, and retrain; but when print pits itself against online, tries to look and act like online, it loses.
Tom Hennen continues the mortifying job of calling libraries that dropped off the Top Ten lists or moved significantly in the ranking to warn them of the error before they issue a press release touting their HAPLR rating status. A surprising number of empathetic message have arrived in my mailbox from people who work with statistics and know that stuff happens. Both Tom and I continue to beat ourselves up over what we could have done to prevent it—some simple comparisons or another double check. The fact is, rushing is the biggest error producer of all, and we were rushing. So, apparently is the Tribune, judging by the rising rate of minor typos. But I can tell them that it’s only a matter of time before they make a really big one. Meanwhile, the company continues to reorganize and reinvent and redefine. And what’s the fallout for us? American Libraries is currently advertising for an Associate Editor, and we have received a wildly unprecedented 130 applications from well qualified people (this is after HR screens out the unqualified!), many of them listing the previous employer as none other than the Chicago Tribune.
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:14 pm by Leonard Kniffel
“Where is the outrage?” That’s what Garrison Keillor asked recently in his syndicated column, calling the federal bailout of the financial market “a calamity people accept as if it were just one more hurricane…. It wasn’t their money they were playing with,” he added. “It was yours. Where were the cops?”
It was library money too, and already we are seeing the effect on philanthropy and on budgets at the local level.
The American Library Association showed some outrage when it signed on to a September 23 letter to the Senate Banking Committee urging that sections of the bailout legislation be changed to address “one of the current crisis’ fundamental causes—corruption and other abuses of power sustained by secrecy. Otherwise, the taxpayers could end up giving $700 billion more to repeat the same disasters. Congress must prove it has learned this lesson. Any genuine solution must be grounded in transparency, with all relevant records publicly available and best practice whistleblower protection for all employees connected with the new law. Secrecy worsened this crisis, and taxpayers will not accept a law for secret solutions. What happens to our money is our business.” Bravo to that
In addition to worrying about the financial outlook for their own institututions, a lot of American Library Association members are worried about ALA, knowing that if library and association boards monitored their finances like the federal government, we’d all be out of business, and there would be no bailout. Like libraries across the country, ALA will pay for the folly on Wall Street.
I talked with author and fundraising expert Patricia Martin (former director of the ALA Development Office) this morning and asked her to assess the impact the national financial fiasco will have on philanthropic support. The bad news, she told me, is that although banks and financial institutions love to sponsor things like summer reading programs, youth library programs, and family literacy programs, those contributions were often funded by executives with discretionary dollars, so they didn’t necessarily have to go through a marketing department. “These dollars are significant,” she said, sometimes as much as $250,000 worth of discretionary charitable giving, “and those budgets are being slashed left and right. And it’s not just the bad economy, it’s the fact that the bad economy goes right to the heart of the most traditional supporters of library programs.”
The good news,” Martin told me, “is that libraries swing so many ways. In an economic crisis, they become relevant for economic development and support of small business and job searching and retraining opportunities. There are just a lot of ways that you can characterize the work of the library and be flexible to stand out in what is going to be a very cluttered, very frenzied fundraising market
I also spoke today with Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey. She had a similar view of the situation, saying that the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s annual Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner (with author Tom Wolfe) scheduled for next Wednesday was sold out before the invitations hit the mail, so the immediate outlook is not bleak. But she also said that private philanthropy is undoubtedly going to get tighter in the months ahead.
On the positive side, Dempsey also noted that through a lot of strategic planning and implementation, with the support of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the city council, she felt that CPL was well positioned to weather the storm. “There are reasons people want to come into the library,” she said, thanks to a long-term building program and state-of-the-art technology. CPL offers “financial literacy classes free of charge and computer classes free of charge,” she said, “so, I think we’ve worked very hard to build that brand knowledge and now it is spreading quite rapidly, and I’m grateful that we are prepared for the worst so that when people need us we are there.” Circulation in Chicago is up 25% over last year and this years Summer Reading Program was the largest ever—50,000 children who read 1.2 million books, she told me.
The rising popular demand for library services is something we can all hold up against the inevitable cuts that will be bandied about many of our libraries as the result of the nation’s financial melt-down.
Meanwhile, ALA Treasurer Rod Hersberger is working with Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels to prepare a statement on state of the Association’s financial health for the November issue of American Libraries. Here’s a preview of what he is saying: “Even though ALA is in a period of belt tightening, the Association is healthy financially. Membership continues to increase and registration for the 2009 Midwinter Meeting in Denver is off to a good start. We are looking forward to successful annual conferences over the next two years in two of the Association’s record-breaking sites: Chicago and Washington DC. We believe that we have adopted a prudent approach to the Fiscal Year 2009 budget. Our goal is to weather whatever rough waters lie ahead, while at the same time maintaining our services to members, as well as maintaining forward momentum on the many new and expanded ALA programs and services that benefit all librarians and all libraries.”
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:29 pm by Leonard Kniffel
This week, the ALA Council’s list is buzzing over the Association’s move to an all-electronic voting system for the forthcoming election of officers and Council members. Of course any member of the Association is still going to be able to obtain a paper ballot on demand. Nevertheless, many are concerned that voting via the internet might pose a hardship for some members. From inside ALA, I can assure you that any member who is unable or unwilling to vote electronically will be accommodated, but to argue in 2008 that we should stick with paper ballots and the U.S. Postal Service seems futile. As it is, the ALA election runs from October (nominations were announced this week) until June (winners appear in American Libraries print). That’s nine months, the same amount of time it takes to produce a child.
As councilor Christine Hage so aptly put it, “I may be off on my numbers, but I believe that ALA has about 65,000 members of which fewer that 20,000 vote. Members have several weeks in which to cast their ballots. The voting process probably takes less than 30 minutes. If find it hard to believe that a member of ALA, who actually is going to vote, would have difficultly gaining computer access for 30 minutes sometime in a two–three week window that voting takes place. If library staff or those associated with libraries are not able to get on a computer to vote, we have bigger problems than ALA voting.”
Councilor Ria Newhouse put it even more bluntly: “WHY do we continue to go around and around about this when the option to have a paper ballot STILL exists?No one has (yet) proposed a total elimination! Until someone makes that proposal, it very much appears that all members are still being accommodated, so let’s quit arguing about it.”
By way of introduction: my name is Greg, and I’m an associate editor for American Libraries.
In my view, Inside Scoop isn’t a place for “official statements”—they have their place and their purpose, I guess, but this isn’t it. So what exactly will Inside Scoop entail? For me, there’s an easy answer and a hard answer.
The easy (right) answer is: This is a place for American Libraries editors to share information that we think is interesting and worth sharing with readers, under our own names, that can be shared effectively in a blog format. Much of this will naturally be directly ALA-related; for some topics, the connection will come from the topic’s relation to librarianship as a whole.
The hard (wrong) answer? It’s still being drawn up as official policy, reviewed, vetted, spindled, mutilated, filed in triplicate, and distributed by mimeograph. I’m not planning to go out of my way to help that one along.
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:48 am by Leonard Kniffel
Inside Scoop is American Libraries’ new, and first, general blog. The purpose of Inside Scoop is to offer American Libraries’ readers news and views from inside the American Library Association’s headquarters in Chicago, in combination with American Libraries Direct, our weekly electronic newsletter. As AL Editor in Chief, I want to shorten the lag between what’s new at headquarters and when we tell you about it, between what’s hot on the ALA Council’s electronic list and when you hear about it.
What’s motivating us? Dave Pollard in his How to Save the World blog recently posted “12 Tools that Will Soon Go The Way of Fax and CDs,” with this to say about the future of organization blogging: “My own research has indicated that most people who visit [business] sites are job-seekers, the media, and competitors. A combination of marketing/PR hype, just-in-case recycled internal junk, and self-congratulation, most corporate websites are devoid of useful content, and those that do have useful stuff have it buried where it can’t be found. You just can’t put a filing cabinet up online and expect people to wade through it . . . . Next-gen blogs by individual employees—personal, casual, chatty, accessible, hosted but uncensored by the employer—will soon blow even the best corporate websites out of the water.”
Provocative stuff. While I don’t expect to blow the ALA website out of the water with Inside Scoop, I do expect to offer up-to-date commentary and insight into day-to-day life at ALA in ways that our websites, press releases, and publications cannot. Joining me initially in this endeavor will be Associate Editor Greg Landgraf, bringing his perspective from “the lower floors” of what many see as the ALA ivory tower. Not coincidentally, Greg is the mover and the shaker behind Inside Scoop.
Welcome and enjoy. We look forward to hearing from you!