Caveat Lector

I caught a little flak in the comments to this post at Blue Skunk Blog for rudely thumbing my nose at ALA.

So let’s just burn a couple of homines straminei (erm, genitive plural… hominum stramineorum? that doesn’t seem quite right, somehow) before I go on.

ALA may not realize this and certainly has no incentive to acknowledge it, but they aren’t the only game in town for a professionally-active librarian. They’re not even an especially desirable organization to join for librarians with a techie bent, LITA or no LITA. Me, I’ll be happy to produce my nice new ASIST and VLA cards on request. (And before anybody asks, VLA is on trial. If they seem to be worth my money, I’ll stay a member. ASIST hooked me fair and square with DASER.)

I also write my congresscritters (CURES Act, do you hear me? it is a good thing; write your congresscritter now!) and funnel odd bits of money in the direction of Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both of whom do political work that is relevant to my professional interests. So I’m not over-pleased with the insinuation that I’m a professional and activist slacker merely because I told ALA to take a long walk off a short pier.

Let me fire that smelly fish back, shall I, then? In my experience, there is a not-insubstantial subset (mark me well, a subset: I don’t need piles of angry “but I’m not like that!” email) of ALA members who are essentially serving time. They need something to put in the “professional involvement” section of their résumé. They need conferences to go to, and aren’t any too picky about the subject matter. They need committees to serve on, and the less work they actually have to do, the better. They are passionless, uninteresting drifters, and (again, in my experience), ALA has got a lot of ’em.

It’s a turnoff. I could volunteer for a committee, but how do I know I won’t be stuck with a passel of drifters? How do I know the committee isn’t just make-work to begin with? If it isn’t, is the larger organization going to get out of the committee’s way, or in it? Are presenters doing a given conference because they’ve got something they’re dying to tell the rest of us, or because they’re coming up for review in six months and need conference cred?

(Curiously, the preconference tutorial I went to at ACRL vastly outshone any of the actual talks I saw there. Perhaps an artifact of the amount of work it takes to put together a three-hour tutorial versus a twenty-minute talk? If you’re a résumé padder, of course you try for the talk. I admit to a certain amount of bias here, though; I’m an odd duck in that I vastly prefer creating and delivering tutorials to talks. Not that I don’t like to run my mouth on any excuse, of course.)

I don’t blame ALA for attracting drifters. As the default, faute-de-mieux professional association for librarians, they could hardly do otherwise. But the drifters’ presence is another reason to hunt for other (likely smaller and more specialized) professional venues.

Doug Johnson of Blue Skunk Blog asked me in email what ALA could do to win me back. Fair question. Here’s a start toward some answers:

• A huge financial audit, specifically one that speaks to organizational efficiency. I saw Meredith’s numbers, and so did you. I want an explanation, and additional comparisons to similar organizations. (No, Walt, “lobbyists” is not answer enough; Meredith’s comparison organization has lobbyists too.)
• An organizational assessment, or whatever they’re calling it these days when you don your hip-waders and start digging around the organization to find and eliminate blockages and excess. ALA’s too big for its britches, as Meredith’s figures demonstrate.
• More multiplicity of voices, fewer bully pulpits. If Gorman’s vile and disgusting hip-hop comment had met with vociferous opposition (dare I say, actual censure?), I would feel much less jaundiced about ALA. Certain tentative steps in this direction are happening, but a tentative step is not exactly a stride.

• More concern for librarians, many of whom (lest we forget) do not work in libraries. That, or more openness about the organization’s aims. I know it’s the American Library (rather than Librarian) Association, but let’s face it—there’s a conflict of interest there. When librarian interests conflict with library interests (e.g. over salaries, librarian deprofessionalization, coddling vendors, or entry-level librarianship), I know whom the ALA sides with, and it ain’t me.

  If library schools stay fat and sassy despite a lack of jobs for graduates, and library administrators pay lousy salaries because even with lousy salaries they’re beating off applicants with sticks—ALA seems perfectly content. Well, I’m not.

  The flap over treatment of conference speakers speaks to this point also. I think I can be forgiven for thinking that ALA runs conferences and prints publications in order to siphon off yet more money from librarians and libraries to itself—not least because, as I said, their finances are bloated and opaque. And speaking of publications…

• Open access to ALA journals. Now. Immediately. I’m shocked and disgusted by ALA dragging its feet on this. They should have been first on the bandwagon; it’s their duty to set an example for other scholarly and professional societies to follow! (C&RL, which is going OA, is a start, but it’s not near enough.) Book publishing is a different animal altogether, and I don’t have a problem with paid writing staying paid, so I’m not calling for open access to books at this juncture. Unpaid writing in journals, though? Should be open-access. What better use could ALA put its money to?
• Noticeably less hostility to computers and the librarians and patrons who use, program, and value them. Gorman’s got a posse, you better believe. I’d prefer “no hostility,” of course, but I’m realistic.

That’s my answer. I invite fellow ALA defectors to offer other and better answers of their own.

Another thing, though, as long as I’m in rant-mode. I don’t buy the “I pay dues so that I’ve got the right to kvetch” argument, at least where ALA is concerned. ALA listens to dollars, not librarians; the response on the Council list to the speakers’ flap (detailed over at Meredith’s) says that loud and clear. Continuing to write them checks despite serious qualms about them positively deafens their ears to your words. It’s a speech act whose perlocutionary force is “ALA right or wrong!”

The eminently logical response from ALA? “Sure, they whine, but where they gonna go? They can whine all they want as long as the checks clear.”

Talk with your wallet and your feet instead. I have. If ALA wants me back, they’ll have to earn me.