01.28.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:48 am by Leonard Kniffel
The third and final Midwinter session of ALA Council commenced bright and early Wednesday morning and the agenda moved rapidly into resolutions presented by Ken Wiggin, chair of the Committee on Legislation. The Council passed a glowing resolution praising President Barack Obama for “recognizing the importance of openness, transparency, and accountability in government by signing an executive order on presidential records and presidential memoranda on the Freedom of Information Act and Transparency and Open Government on his first day in office.” The ALA governing body then passed a resolution urging the United States Congress to reauthorize the Library Services and Technology Act “in a timely manner.”
During the International Relations Committee report delivered by chair Beverly Lynch, Councilor Al Kagan urged that we cannot achieve peace and stop the destruction of libraries and cultural institutions in Gaza without changing the policies of the U.S. government. A resolution on the connection between the recent Gaza conflict and libraries was introduced and the perpetual debate ensued: Is it the Association’s role to insinuate itself into international affairs? Councilor Elaine Harger argued that peace is a library issue, just as civil rights was in the 1960s, and Executive Board member Larry Romans cited ALA policy related to the Association’s social responsibilities.
With limited opposition, the resolution then passed, calling for “the protection of libraries and archives in Gaza and Israel” and urging the U.S. government “to support the United States Committee of the Blue Shield in upholding the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.” It also “calls on the U.S. government to continue working for a permanent peace in the region.”
Ken Wiggin also announced that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has put a hold on applying the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act of 2008 to libraries. The legislation was passed to protect children from lead in toys, but it also included children’s books among items that need to be screened for lead. While lead poisoning is a serious issue, the is no evidence that the ink in books poses any real danger. Librarians have been lobbying for exemption to the act—which attendees have been talking about throughout the Midwinter Meeting—because it would force libraries to either test every book in their collections or prohibit children from handling them.
Elected to the board: Patricia Hogan, Stephen Matthews, Courtney Young
Among other actions, the Council elected three of its members to serve three-year terms on the ALA Executive Board, beginning at the end of Annual Conference this summer: Patricia M. Hogan, Stephen L. Matthews, and Courtney L. Young.
Updated Midwinter attendance figures released January 26 show a grand total of 10,220 attendees, compared to 13,601 in Philadelphia in 2008. The figure is very close to attendance projections but in categories that will not meet revenue projections. People opted for lower-price-tag events and categories, such as exhibits-only, Deidre Ross, head of Conference Services told me. Denver is also a location that does not lend itself to drive-in attendance from nearby cities, the way Philadelphia does.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:20 am by Leonard Kniffel
Strolling through the Midwinter exhibit hall just before it closed on Monday afternoon, I felt that traffic was light and wondered what some of the vendors would have to say about it, plus I wanted to pick their brains about what they were doing to prepare for revenue drops precipitated by the economic meltdown.
I was pleasantly surprised to be told by several people that show traffic had actually been quite good and their company’s financial health was not nearly as compromised as I’d thought it might be. Vinod Chachra of VTLS told me international business was up and keeping the company well in the black. In fact, he said, VTLS is hiring, not laying off, largely due to international business. “We’ve had a record year,” he said, and “we’re investing it in R&D and customer support.”
Stacilee Oakes Whiting of SirsiDynix echoed Chachra, saying the company over the past 18 months has had 15 product releases and was also hiring. I asked what they had killed during that period, and she said WebCat, in order to concentrate on Enterprise and Library Lan.
Whiting was one of several people who told me during the conference that vendors want to help libraries demonstrate the value of the products and services patrons receive for free by issueing a receipt with every transaction that shows what “you saved” by using the library instead of going shopping. The receipts would be similar to what some grocery stores do with their “preferred customer” cards—except that in grocery stores, the final tab is never zero. I remember many years ago someone wrote to me and asked what American Libraries could do to start a movement in this direction. It is an interesting concept, and maybe ALA’s new Office for Library Advocacy can help us figure out how to take it national.
I talked with Andrea Sevetson and Marina Azariah at LexisNexis, who gave me a demonstration of the company’s expanded Interactive Statistical Database. They also said the company was doing well and subscriptions showed no sign of declining. A member of ALA’s Government Documents Round Table, Sevetson’s major complaint about the conference was not low traffic in the exhibit hall; rather, it was the Association’s website. Echoing round table members at the Planning and Budget Assembly, she said it was frustrating for volunteers to have to train so intensively on the Collage content managment system and then have it fail on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, ALA staff received an e-mail message from Al Companio, building maintenance supervisor, saying that on January 27 at approximately 3:30, ALA experienced sewage water damage caused by the 30 East Huron condo with which the Association shares the building.
“The damage to the elevator car and shaft is extensive due to sewage that entered the shaft at the eighth floor,” said Companio. He explained that the maintenance staff and a contractor plumber hired by the condo association had attempted to clear a blockage in a six-inch sewer pipe and “was overwhelmed by the volume of sewage that rushed down the pipe when they cleared the blockage and entered into our shaft.” Ewww.
ALA employees left the building due to the odor, Companio said, and condo maintenance people were mopping up the sewage that entered into the 40 East Huron lobby. While damage is being assessed and clean-up continues, staff will probably be staying home this week because “the stench may still be quite strong and could affect our employees ability to work in such an environment.”
Welcome home!
Permalink
01.27.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:54 pm by Greg Landgraf
As my last Midwinter post (from the Denver airport, on a decidedly spotty wireless connection), I offer this collection of interesting, thought-provoking, or just amusing quotes from the meeting—weather heard or overheard.
“I’m just going to stand here and have a wonderful time!” —a woman near the entrance on Friday, apparently after unexpectedly meeting the latest in a string of friends.
“I’ve had comments about areas of librarianship that have not been included. If you included every area or specialty of librarianship, you wouldn’t have the core anymore. You’d have the whole field.”—Linda Williams, coordinator of library media services at Anne Arundel County (Md.) Public Library, defending the Statement of Core Competences at the Forum on Library Education.
“My job is to kind of drag you along or pull the reader along and keep you surprised”—author Erica Spindler at the Women of Mystery author discussion.
“I’ve managed to come this far by doing everything wrong. I couldn’t write an outline with a gun to my head.”—author Nancy Atherton at the Women of Mystery author discussion.
“Badges and smiles, folks! Badges and smiles!”—demand of the Colorado Convention Center employee monitoring the entrance to the exhibit hall at its opening.
“One technology we do not have is amplification.”—Maurice York, chair of the LITA Top Tech Trends committee. Attendees were pleased to have wireless access, but the lack of microphones sometimes made hearing difficult.
“It’s the Karen show.”—Observation at the Top Tech Trends discussion; three of the panelists were named Karen (Schneider, Coombs, and Coyle).
“The test for the open source community is, can you move past your founding library or founding community”—Karen Schneider, community librarian for Equinox, at the Top Tech Trends discussion.
“They use robots because they’re efficient. I love automation but you have to not overautomate.”—Marshall Breeding, director for technology and research at Vanderbilt University, warning against overexuberance after Schneider told of an Australian library where patrons can watch through windows as robots check their books in.
“There are visible staff to assist, but you don’t want to tie people into doing mundane, routine, mind-numbing tasks.”—Schneider, confirming that the library hadn’t overautomated.
“Technology is like a rabid puppy. It’s running around destroying your house.” Karen Coombs, head of web services at the University of Houston, discussing the need to constantly upgrade technology and why grants might not be sufficient to help rural areas to get broadband internet access.
“Bernie Margolis, proud and pleased to be the state librarian of New York.”—Margolis identifying himself, to enthusiastic applause, at the Membership Town Hall.
“If we could ask the president to commit $1 for every person in the United States to flow to public libraries through IMLS and state libraries, can you imagine what an impact that would be?”—Barbara Genco, Brooklyn Public Library, at the Membership Town Hall.
“I’d like to encourage you to say thank you because [Obama's] done more for public records in two days than many administrations did in 12 months.” Gladys Ann Wells, Arizona state librarian, at the Membership Town Hall.
“Any initiative [Obama] has, there’s probably a way that libraries can support that.”—Heidi Dolamore, Contra Costa Public Library, at the Membership Town Hall.
“I love my library!”—Colorado Convention Center employee, exclaimed as he passed the ALA Press Room.
“About to drink second cup of tea without Marmalade this morning. Also, I just won the Newbury Medal for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK.”—Newbery Medal-winning author Neil Gaiman’s Twitter tweet announcing the honor.
“Newbery, not Newbury. Also ****!!!! I won the ******* NEWBERY THIS IS SO ******* AWESOME. I thank you.”—Gaiman’s tweet correcting his spelling error—and enthusing with a bit of decidedly adult language. Apparently the news had started to sink in.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:20 pm by Greg Landgraf
I visited Denver Public Library this morning, invited by DPL writer/editor (and author of AL’s Midwinter dining guide this year) Sherry Spitsnaugle. It was a lovely tour of a wonderful building, but the whole event was overshadowed by the big event of the day.
This morning, a woman who was riding the bus to work went into labor. The bus was passing the library at the time, so she got off and got help inside the building, and the girl was born (before opening hours) in the library foyer.
While details weren’t well-known, the news was still on the lips of all of the staffers, with many brainstorming names for the healthy baby girl (my favorite: Dewetta), and the librarians in the children’s department quipping that if only the ambulence had been a bit slower to arrive they could have finished the paperwork to get the child her first library card. The library, naturally, is eagerly seeking more information, and the Denver Post is following the story.
With that happy news on our minds, Sherry gave me a tour of the building. Several photos from that tour are below.
East entrance to the Denver Public Library
West entrance to Denver Public Library
Denver Public Library's Western History Room, which is also often used for events.
The Legacy Table, where ten world leaders met at the Denver Public Library for the Denver Summit of the Eight June 20-22, 1997.
President Clinton's nameshield on the Legacy Table.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:04 am by Leonard Kniffel
ALA is a pretty big organization, with a $58-million annual budget, ALA Treasurer Rod Hersberger said at the second Midwinter session of the ALA Council. He’s concerned about ALA’s “mature businesses” that are not yielding annual revenue growth and the need to develop new businesses. Echoing what he said at the Planning and Budget Assembly, Hersberger talked about the need to develop new products for new markets. Among his ideas are capitalizing internationally on the ALA brand and turning more units into revenue generating centers.
Hersberger concentrated his report on the work of the Washington Office, urging that a larger portion (the current level is about 25%) of programmatic resources be devoted to the office.
ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels said we are introducing a more formal method for developing new businesses, especially for their capitalization. As a member of the ALA Publishing staff, I can attest to the fact that ideas for new businesses have been easy to imagine over the past few years but capitalizing them has been another matter altogether in an organization that is a 10 on the risk averse scale. New businesses mean new risks, and I wonder if the Association is going to be willing to take them, especially in a climate where financial security seems ever less attainable.
We’re not a the bottom of the slump yet, and there is always a lag in ALA feeling the pinch, said Hersberger. Units that aren’t performing as well as they should “may need some attention,” he added. Fiels said expenditures will undoubtedly need to be reduced in accord with revenue reduction, but he noted that there is no magic place where I have eight people sitting in a room doing nothing and can just eliminate the positions with no impact on the operation.”
Councilor Marilyn Hinshaw observed that ”the federal government can’t do it all,” and we will have to help ourselves through this national financial crisis.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:43 am by Leonard Kniffel
Muhammad Yunus
Could ALA President Jim Rettig have picked a better speaker for this Midwinter President’s Program than Muhammad Yunus? I don’t think so. With American capitalism failing at numerous levels, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty told the amazing story of his crusade to end world poverty with a lending system that defies the traditional notion of how banks do business.
Yunus started his talk by admitting that he had learned a lot about the American Library Association following the invitation to speak—first that it existed, and second that it could be so large. If you doubt that we have plenty more public-awareness raising to do, consider Yunus’s remark that “now I see what my project and libraries have in common.” He went on to explain how his Grameen Bank evolved in Bangladesh. Of poverty, he said, “The problem is difficult but the solution is simple.”
“A sense of uselessness grips you,” Yunus said, describing his conversion from a student of economics to a force for social and economic change. “Let’s forget about the study of economics,” he said. “Why don’t I go to the people and see if I can make myself useful to them?”
From this epiphany, came the concept of micro-loans. Yunus realized that poverty-stricken villagers were turning to loan sharks for money. He calculated that 42 people owing a loan shark $27 meant that so many people “had to suffer so much for so little; if I could give the $27, I could solve the problem for the people, and that is what I did.” Yunus’s initial gift of $27 led to the founding of the Grameen (it means “village,” he said) Bank, which today makes loans to more than six million families on the basic premise that if you pay the money back, you get more money.
The business of business is making money, said Yunus, but human beings are multidimentional and not only about making money. But charity is not the answer, he warned, because money given through charity never comes back.
Yunus’s onstage monologue included some compelling and moving comments about how he defied conventional capitalist wisdom, with the philosophy that “rules are made to be changed”:
On the fact that many women said the loans should go to their husbands, not to them, he said, “This is not her voice; this is the voice of the history that created her.”
On what he has been advised to do, he said, “I do the opposite, and it works.”
“Poverty is not created by poor people, poverty is created by the system, the way we build it,” Yunus said. “All human beings are packed with unlimited potential.” Yunus said with conviction that he foresaw a time when we would have to creat “poverty museums” so people could understand what had once been widespread.
Rettig noted that libraries make micro-loans—gifts really—of knowledge that help people transform their lives, improve their well-being, and literally develop their local economies. There had to have been at least a thousand people in the audience, and they spontaneously leaped to their feet with approval at the end of Yunus’s talk. While there remains much to be done, the bottom line, so to speak, for Yunus is that his system works and he has proven it.
Permalink
01.26.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:50 pm by Greg Landgraf
Margaret A. Edwards Award Committee Chair David Mowery models the shirt worn by each member of the committee at the Youth Media Awards announcements
The big news of Monday at Midwinter is always the Youth Media Awards announcements—the naming of the winning books of the Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, King, and 12 other awards.
I’m not breaking any news about who the winners are (though here’s the full list if you’ve missed it). I’m also not the first to relay the news of Newbery Medal Winner Neil Gaiman’s exuberant (but major swear-containing) tweets about the award. But I can share a bit of behind-the-scenes information.
I had the opportunity to watch several of the award committees calling the winning authors and take video for AL Focus. On the phone, Gaiman was delighted and G-rated. In fact, none of the authors did any swearing; beforehand I was advised that in their excitement winners often use some adult language. Instead, the authors were pretty consistently overjoyed but shocked, and perhaps a bit muted because of that.
A bit more surprising to me was the committees themselves. They were consistently thrilled, and excited—and nervous. On a couple of occasions, the committees had to negotiate who would be the one to actually speak to the author, invariably initiated by a committee member who felt too awestruck, suggesting that someone else speak.
Of course, the committees are calling people whose work they hold in great esteem. And the calls are the climax of an intense period for them—Caldecott Committee Chair Nell Colburn told me of the whirlwind of activity her committee had undertaken, from deliberations beginning on Friday to several hours of press interviews after the award announcements. So perhaps their nervousness shouldn’t be surprising. They’ve put a lot of themselves into their selections.
Permalink
01.25.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:11 pm by Leonard Kniffel
During today’s Planning and Budget Assembly, ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels and President-elect Camila Alire fielded questions from members. One ALAer representing ACRL brought up an issue that has been much commented on in Inside Scoop: What’s the future of print journals? And she wanted to know what ALA was doing about the issue of print vs. electronic association-wide, especially given the current budget climate.
ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels said we are making decisions on an individual basis, based on the economics of the operation. American Libraries has been working with Membership to respond to the demand from some members for an opt-out choice in the personalized membership communication preferences. That is coming.
It was also clear to me that most people in the room had not noticed that American Libraries published its first-ever digital supplement this month, focused on CE and library education. We are planning another for spring around library architecture, interior design, and furnishings. We need to see how readers respond and advertisers as well.
ALA Treasurer Rod Hersberger talked about the three major areas of revenue for ALA: conferences, publication, and dues, calling them “mature businesses.” That’s not a problem, he said, until you consider the amount of new money ALA needs each year. Current products are for current markets, he said, and we have to take a look at cost-cutting that could be achieved by, for example, bundling the journals. Are we going to look at new products for current markets, he asked, or current products for new markets? Do we have services and products that could appeal to other associations?
Jim Neal, chair of the Budget Analysis and Review Committee, asked if ALA had a global strategy for its brand. “It’s going to require some freer thinking than we have done,” he said, adding that this involves recognizing our assets, capitalizing new ventures, and building a competitive sense.
There was a good deal of complaining about the ALA website, mostly centering around the Collage CMS. “We’re not looking very nimble and agile,” said one person. Others suggested that ALA simply has to put more emphasis on IT, maybe even by outsourcing it. Collage has been a nightmare, said representatives from round tables who noted that it was a lot to expect that volunteers had to take extensive training to be able to post and then find the site down far too frequently.
As an ALA insider, I can tell you that Collage has been equally frustrating for staff, especially with IT responsibility spread all over the building, involving people with varying degrees of skill. Part of the solution is no doubt to get all the Web workers on staff to talk to each other regularly and set out the week’s goals in a coordinated fashion. We are working on that in a marketing working group that is setting out goals for cross-unit collaboration under the leadership of ALA Associate Executive Director for Communications Cathleen Bourdon.
Everyone is concerned about the financial outlook, that goes without saying, but while the Planning and Budget Assembly provided good guidance for staff, the future seems to be anyone’s guess. ALA Associate Executive Director for Finance Greg Calloway told me at the meeting that we will look at preregistration numbers for Annual Conference on March 1, “and that will be a key indicator of potential fiscal issues we may have to face.” Spring numbers will indicate if further cuts are necessary, he said, in addition to the 3% cut across the board (10% in Publishing) that is already being implemented. Our investment income is down” said Calloway, but fortunately we are not dependent on long-term investments for operating expenses, so the impact right now is not as great as it’s been for other organizations. “Our membership is steady at the personal dues level, and in a strained economic time,” he said, “that loyalty is a very positive note.”
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:50 pm by Greg Landgraf
LITA’s traditional Top Tech Trends discussion played to a standing-room-only crowd this morning, although the event was briefly delayed by a fire alarm in the hotel.
Participants and attendees ignored the alarm, which proved to be nothing, and focused on four topics: the management of open-source software, the growth of geolocational technologies, linked data, and the effect of the economy on technology choices in libraries.
Open Source
Karen Coombs, head of web services at the University of Houston, observed the number of companies being formed to manage open-source software. “That’s a really big change. In the past, open-source has always required your own developers and staff to support.”
Karen Schneider, community librarian at Equinox, said that when libraries were developing their own integrated library systems in the 1970s and 80s, they tended to follow the same model: Development would stay within the library, and the ILS would continually get harder to maintain, until it got complicated enough that the library had no choice but to buy a vendor product. “Now, the test for the open source community is, ‘Can you move past your founding library or founding community?’”
Clifford Lynch, director of the Coalition for Networked Information, discussed the successes of the Flickr Commons, particularly the unanticipated benefit that when libraries posted photos online, users returned narratives about those images that go beyond “the trivialities of tagging.” Participants are now looking at ways to take that data and put it into their own databases, although Lynch warned that no model has been developed yet that would scale to large numbers of issues.
Geolocation
Panelists saw two distinct applications for the ubiquity of geographic information. Library consultant Karen Coyle sees the ability to deliver information based on where someone is on the earth; for example, seeing a building and having information about it delivered to them. Coyle also called for an Open Street Map for libraries, although one audience member announced that she had just finished geocoding every library in Texas and suggested that other state library associations might have similar projects underway.
Lynch and Coombs focused instead on what Lynch termed “fine geolocation” to provide GPS-type data within an individual library. For example, a cellphone-based system that “can tell you you’re in the wrong shelf; you need to be two shelves over,” Lynch explained. An audience member said the National Library of Singapore is already testing this kind of system.
Linked data
Roy Tennant of OCLC Research said that linked data may make him “eat half of my hat” regarding his skepticism toward the Semantic Web, although there are not yet specific examples. “First we have to make it possible to do things and then see what happens,” he said, noting that the Library of Congress is planning to put up a site using linked data in the next 4-6 weeks.
Economic considerations
“In rank-and-file libraries, I’m seeing a controlled burn,” Schneider said. “Libraries are looking much harder at their processes. Ideally, that would lead to getting rid of the silly stuff and focussing on the useful stuff.” The panel agreed that the poor economy may encourage more libraries to install self-check capabilities.
The panel also discussed the problem of getting broadband access to rural areas. “It’s not even a money problem, it’s an end-of-the-road problem,” Schneider said. Coombs illustrated the point with the plight of her parents, who have to connect to the internet with a 28.8 modem because the cable company doesn’t think it would be cost-effective to run cable to their house.
Lynch called for “a considerably more nuanced and fluid public policy here,” and urged rural libraries not to frame the lack of broadband as solely a library issue. “It’s a much broader economic and development problem and should be taken on as a municipal or regional issue.”
The LITA Blog liveblogged the session (see me sideways with computer at 8:22), and the session was streamed at www.ustream.tv/channel/griffey.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:31 pm by Leonard Kniffel
Emceed by Tina Jordan of HarperCollins, this morning’s breakfast program offering from the Association of American Publishers’ Trade Libraries Committee turned out to be a surprise treat amidst the business meetings. Eight authors shared stories about their writing lives, their latest books, and their love of libraries: Eli Gottlieb, Now You See Him (Harper Perennial); Brian Dennis Monaghan and Geraldine V. Monaghan, The Power of Two (Workman); P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast, Hunted (St. Martin’s Griffin); Craig Johnson, Another Man’s Moccasins (Viking Penguin); Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone (Alfred A. Knopf); and Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North (Little, Brown and Company). A selection of quotes from the authors:
Gottlieb: “Films will never be able to show the nuance and subtleties of human relationships the way a book can.”
Geraldine Monaghan: On dealing with her husband’s serious illness: “No one ever tells you to be courageous unless you’re going to need it.”
“We approached it as if this were a war, cancer was the enemy, and we were going to defeat it.”
Johnson: On his willingness to accept a six-pack as stipend for library appearances: “The library wasn’t big enough to hold the event so they held it in a bar on Main Street.” “I haven’t bought beer in three years.”
On being caught speeding in a small town and recognized as an author by the officer who said: ”We wish you would slow down, Mr. Johnson, we’d like to get some more books out of you.”
Verghese: On being a physician called to write: “At the age of 12 my true calling to medicine came, and it came in a book, Of Human Bondage.”
“Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.”
Urrea: “If not for librarians I wouldn’t be here.”
“Librarians don’t distribute books, they distribute hope.”
On living in a tough neighborhood as a child: “I learned very early that it was better to stay home and read than to go out and get beat up.”
The meeting was cosponsored by HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Workman, Macmillan, Random House/Bertelsmann, and Get Caught Reading.
Permalink
« Previous entries
