07.15.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 8:40 pm by Leonard Kniffel
“We expect to close the revenue/expense gap in ’09,” said James Neal, chair of ALA’s Budget Analysis and Review Committee, “but the conference revenue picture will be critical.” The Annual Conference saw an attendance bump-up in Chicago, he noted today at the final meeting of the ALA Executive Board, but the final numbers will tell.
To begin the telling, Conference Services Director Deidre Ross then reported the latest attendance stats, saying that Annual Conference had 22,762 registrants, along with 6,179 exhibitors, for a total attendance of 28,941, possibly the highest ever. These are not final figures, Ross added, but they are close. At 106% of budget, “which is excellent,” she said, $2.1 million dollars was projected, so the numbers mean roughly an additional $120,000. Ross also noted that 60 people paid and registered for the virtual version of the conference that ALA offered for the first time this year.
Ross noted that exhibiting companies had rented 12% less square footage, which will affect advertising and commissions from hotels. High attendance does not automatically translate into high net revenue because much depends on attendees’ fee-levels, as well as the cost of doing business in the various conference cities that ALA visits.
Asked if major software vendors like Adobe have dropped out of the exhibit hall, Ross told the board that they have never really been there in significant numbers. “We have to work out a sales pitch for that kind of group,” she said. “It’s general software, but they are not going to come to a library conference. They have their own conferences.”
The Executive Board’s general perception of the conference? In the final analysis, no matter how much revenue it generates for ALA, Chicago was a spectacular success.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 8:28 pm by Bev Goldberg
“It’s no wonder that I grew up not merely a storyteller, but a storyteller bewitched by notions of abandoned children” explained Wicked author Gregory Maguire matter-of-factly at the first of ALA Annual’s Auditorium Speaker series for 2009. Telling how he was placed in an orphanage for a time after his mother Helen Maguire died giving birth to him, Maguire described his subsequent family life with his journalist father, poet stepmother, and six siblings. “How could I not be a writer, given all those siblings I needed a distraction from, and my parents wouldn’t buy me a private playhouse or a horse or a personal valet? What else was there to do but write and take vengeance on them all? I made that my life’s mission.”
In captivating fashion, Maguire recounted a seminal afternoon of roleplaying in his family’s backyard that started him on his career path: “playing with stolen property.” Inspired by viewing a Wizard of Oz telecast several evenings earlier, he assigned roles to brothers, sisters, and friends, expanding the cast to include Captain Hook, Peter Pan, and Tinker Bell. When one child protests, “But that’s not the right story,” Maguire recalls responding that this is ”our story” and that “we need to have more than one bad guy so we can make comparisons to see who’s worse.” But on that afternoon, Maguire doesn’t find out; the game is interrupted by his stepmother, who rushes outside to rescue his 13-month-old baby brother from under the back porch, where he is stuck and turning blue after the other children placed him there to portray the Wicked Witch of the East. Baby Joe is saved, but “the story is still open. It’s very seductive.”
“You can see how the game of playing with the cultural material of the Wizard of Oz might, 30-some years later, have ended up in a novel called Wicked and its sequels [Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror, Mirror," Maguire said. Because such iconic tales are "the common language that brings us all together, things that we shared when we were children despite the fact that none of us had known each other, the result is that he "can be assured, not that everybody will like what I do, but that every single person in
Gregory Maguire and Geraldine Fegan
Celebrating the “coming-together of people who care about work with children,” Maguire offered a preview of his forthcoming book Making Mischief, an appreciation of Maurice Sendak (”the artist as scavenger, like kids in a backyard”). Maguire also expressed appreciation to librarians for keeping children’s stories alive, revealing that he dedicated his forthcoming novel Matchless to the profession in general and librarian Geraldine Fegan in particular (she won a fundraising competition Maguire and Lois Lowry held for Massachusetts libraries): “To Geraldine Fegan and to the thousands of school and public librarians who work to keep the library lamps burning during dark times.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 1:13 pm by Sean Fitzpatrick
At the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase July 13, eight presenters gave brief talks on trends in social software in a “speed-dating” format, where each presenter had 10 minutes to talk to a roving audience. I was most interested in hearing Jason Griffey’s talk on Google Wave, a product that, I admit, I hadn’t paid much attention to until his presentation.
Jason Griffey explains Google Wave
Griffey introduced Google Wave as a completely new communications protocol, which combines chat and email for “synchronous and asynchronous communication that’s both public and private.” Griffey conceded that it’s difficult to explain and points to his presentation and to Google’s for a good start. “It’s like email if email were invented in the 21st century,” he said.
We have four different types of online communication today, according to Griffey: email, chat and IM, forums, and Twitter. Among these communication protocols, email is the oldest, with wireless email transmissions as we know them today dating back to 1971. Since then, we have created better, prettier, and more sophisticated ways to handle our email, but the raw transmission and the protocols to transmit the information have changed little.
But most other areas of networked computing have changed drastically. Technology has advanced to offer, among other things, better and faster hardware, cheaper and more compact storage, better server-side software handling, and better protocols for handling end user-generated content. But despite major advances in networked computing, email and chat have remained largely unchanged at their core: The basic metaphor of email is snail mail. Messages travel from Person A to Person B. Person B can respond by sending a message back.
Google Wave differs because conversations are hosted. They exist in one place–a Google server somewhere–and don’t have to travel from one user’s server to another’s. This changes everything, according to Griffey. The Wave format lends itself well to Gadgets and widgets, and Waves can be embedded on websites and blogs. And it’s open-sourced. Beta testing will begin later this year.
It seems like this is just the beginning of what Waves can do, but the tip of the iceberg was all we got with a 10-minute “speed dating” session. Still, it was enough to pique my interest. I was also struck by the similarities between the email paradigm and cataloging, search, and retrieval in libraries: electronic cataloging, like electronic mail, follows the metaphor of its physical predecessor. MARC, an old protocol, mimics card catalogs. How we search OPACs mimics how we used to search card catalogs. Still struck by John Blyberg’s prediction at Top Tech Trends that libraries’ back-end systems will someday have to catch up with their front-end interfaces, I wonder what online library catalogs would look like if online catalogs were (re)invented in the 21st century.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:57 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
ALA’s Social Responsibilities Round Table celebrated its 40th anniversary July 13 at the Alternative Media Reception co-organized with the Alternative Press Center. The party, held at Hyde Park’s funky Experimental Station, included a Mediterranean food buffet, impromptu speeches, jazz from the three-piece combo Brian Sandstrom and Friends, three kinds of vegan cake, and some far left publisher types.
Nate Martin of Stop Smiling magazine shows his publication to attendees
The Exhibits Hall is great, for sure. It’s how we hear about new products the big vendors are rolling out. But thanks to the Alternative Press Center, this party hosted a mix of about a dozen publishers you didn’t get to see at McCormick Place, such as aforementioned Revolution. Also in the mix–and more likely to be added to my reading list–were Chicago-based pubs Stop Smiling and The Point.
SRRT coordinator LaJuan Pringle (below) emceed the event, and several members gave impromptu speeches about SRRT’s achievements in passing resolutions in ALA Council, including their urging ALA to come out against the Vietnam war. SRRT Secretary Mike Marlin told me he was happy about the turnout but wished the city offered better public transportation to Hyde Park, a location that likely prohibited a bigger crowd.
SRRT Coordinator LaJuan Pringle emceed the event.
Even despite difficulty getting there, SRRT couldn’t have picked a more appropriate venue. The Experimental Station calls itself an “incubator of innovative cultural, educational, and environmental projects and small-scale enterprises.” Named from Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1901 speech “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” the Experimental Station blends art and technology under the same roof, according to the Stations’s website. But you may not want to stand on that roof, which also serves as a large balcony from the second floor. We did but were warned it’s not up to code.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 10:32 am by Leonard Kniffel
With healthcare costs eating up chunks of shrinking library budgets across the country, the ALA Council during its last meeting in Chicago overwhelmingly passed a resolution supporting affordable, universal healthcare, including the option of a single-payer healthcare program. This is essentially a reaffirmation of a resolution adopted by ALA in June 2006.
ALA policy states that “ALA recognizes the importance of comprehensive healthcare for all Americans and its impact on libraries and their users.” ALA joined the Universal Health Care Action Network in 2005 and the following year endorsed “expanded Medicare for all,” calling for a single-payer, universal healthcare program.
Citing the rising cost of providing health insurance and the burden it places on state and local governments, the Council noted that it has becoe increasingly difficult for them to adequately fund libraries and schools.
The Council document notes that 46 million people in the United States have no health insurance. “Without good health, humankind cannot truly exercise intellectual freedom and civic engagement.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 9:29 am by Leonard Kniffel
At the final session of the ALA Council today, Committee on Legislation member Bernard Margolis reported that due to the location of Annual Conference 2010 in Washington, D. C., National Library Legislative Day, held annually in May, will become Library Advocacy Day instead. The event is being planned for June 28 during the conference. The switch will enable more ALA members to participate in the annual lobbying effort.
The event will include a rally in Upper Senate Park near the U. S. Capitol. The rally will feature guest speakers, and the committee hopes that up to 2,500 people will participate from every state in the union.
Council also approved the establishment of a representative group within ALA to assess the proposed Google Book Search Settlement. The Committee on Legislation made the recommendation in consideration of the Settlement’s broad potential implications for the profession in the areas of intellectual freedom, copyright and fair use, privacy, acess, and economics.
During the COA report, debate over the reauthorization of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, resulted in the adoption of a resolution prepared by the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee in which ALA urges Congress to allow Section 215 to sunset. The recommendation will be communicated to Congress and President Obama.
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