Getting tired of me writing about conferences? Good. So am I. Still and all…
Something Karen said in her post on the topic caught my eye:
Some state associations will need to stop pretending to be membership-oriented statewide ALA affiliates and will have to become what they really are: PACs for public libraries.
It caught my eye because I almost committed a major stupidity in my last post on this subject. I almost suggested that associations “comp” their speakers’ free labor by handing out receipts for appropriate tax deductions.
This is a major stupidity I almost committed, because library associations aren’t usually 501c3 organizations—that is, formal tax-exempt charities according to the federal tax code. What’s more, most of them can’t be, because charities are basically forbidden to lobby the government.
Hm.
Curiously, 501c3s can pay to argue court cases, “educate voters,” and stuff like that. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is 501c3, and nobody could call them apolitical. But they don’t directly hire legislative lobbyists—at least as far as I know they don’t—because they’d risk their 501c3 status.
Hm, I say again.
What if library organizations split off the lobbying efforts from everything else? “Everything else” could then be 501c3-eligible (leaving volunteers and donors with some nice tax deductions), we’d have a much cleaner separation between political wrangling over libraries and librarians’ professional-development activities, and the annoying refrain “if you don’t support your library association however you can (and no matter how absurd or inefficient it is), you’re letting the big bad gummint trample everything we hold dear!” would come to an abrupt and unmourned (at least by me) end.
Even if the non-lobbyist librarian organization didn’t quite make it under 501c3 guidelines, I can see a potential benefit worth considering: separating library concerns from librarian concerns. The two are not the same; sometimes they’re even at odds. Library organizations generally don’t lobby to raise salaries. A librarian organization might!
I’m not sure why our profession couldn’t accomplish this separation. Except inertia, of course. Or, hell, maybe it’s a goofy idea—you tell me. This is definitely one of those back-of-the-napkin thoughts.
