Getting us back
I’m with Meredith. New shiny communications initiatives are all well and good, but it’ll take more than that to attract me back to ALA.
I’ve weighed in before on how ALA must change if it gives a flying flip about me and people like me. I’m disinclined to repeat myself. I’ll merely add that Meredith’s points 1, 7, 8, and 9 resonate strongly with me as well.
Yes, it is assuredly a problem that ALA is a behemoth without a welcoming public face. My fear, though, is that we’ll get a shiny makeover of the public face without the slightest attention to more substantive issues. ALA needs to be more than Librarian Kaffeeklatsch Central, and no, the lobbying arm (which, I note with annoyance, has barely noticed the CURES Act) is not enough to grant relevance.
If ALA is smart, ALA will see the writing on the wall too. Librarians are finding valuable and congenial ways to network that have nothing whatever to do with ALA. Being Librarian Kaffeeklatsch Central will be less and less a draw as time passes. ALA will have no choice but to do more and look deeper if it wants to capture Gen-X and Millennial librarians.
Moreover, I think ALA consistently asks itself the wrong question about the relationship between services and money. If you read Michael Golrick’s response to Meredith’s post, you see the default question ALA asks: “How can we find money to offer valuable services?”
Wrong question, especially these days. The right question is “How can we offer valuable services as inexpensively as possible?” And if you scroll a bit further down Meredith’s comment section, you see “docwolf” speaking to that theme. I want to see ALA doing that financial audit I spoke of, and the sooner the better.
I will repeat one section of the previous post, because I think it bears repeating:
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 impact 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.”
Drop your ALA membership today, and cite Meredith’s post for why. I’m deadly serious. If we want the organization back, we’re going to have to hurt it first.