October 29, 2006
American Library Association
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Wow! Today ALA’s Nominating Committee announced the slate of candidates for the spring 2007 election for Council, treasurer, and vice-president/president-elect. And I am a candidate for vice-president/president-elect! This is, of course, a great honor. I am grateful to the Nominating Committee for its expression of confidence in me.
I accepted the nomination because I believe that I can make a contribution to ALA as its president. Over the years I have invested a lot of my time in ALA work because I truly believe that this organization benefits its members, the library world, and society at large. It is gratifying to be part of something much larger than oneself, something that is a positive force in the world. ALA has given me much and I have tried to repay ALA through the various assignments and offices I have held. I never imagined that I might have the opportunity to repay ALA by serving as its president. I hope that you and other ALA members will give me your vote and that opportunity. I promise to serve you well. If elected, I will serve as vice-president in 2007-08 and president in 2008-09.
To learn more about my candidacy and me the candidate, see rettigforala.org. (ALA keeps candidates’ names secret until after the Nominating Committee reports to the Executive Board. That occurred this morning. After I was asked to accept the nomination earlier this month I was permitted to tell only my wife and my boss–not even my kids. That meant I was left to my own devices to create the Web site. I believe that I have far, far more to offer ALA than I have to offer as a Web site designer! If anyone adept at such things would like to volunteer to redesign my Web site, please get in touch!)
Please let me hear from you; please share your ideas!
October 13, 2006
librarianship
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On October 12 at the first Joint Conference of Librarians of Color the American Library Association released “Diversity Counts,” the results of a demographic survey of the ALA membership. It looks at ALA's membership and the profession in terms of age, race, gender and compares changes in the composition of the members' characteristics to the characteristics of the U.S. population. There is much to consider in the 36-page report.
Highlights from the press release:
- About 25 percent of Americans were non-white, compared with 11 percent of credentialed librarians;
- African Americans made up 5 percent of the profession but 12.3 percent of the population;
- Latinos represented 2 percent of the profession and 12.5 percent of the population
- Native Americans were less than 1 percent of the profession and .9 percent of the population; and
- Asian Pacific Islanders were 3 percent of the profession and 3.7 percent of the population.
Many of ALA's diversity recruitment efforts began to take hold in 2000; so the picture in 2006 may be better than these statements indicate.
In a presentation at JCLC on October 12 Denise Davis of ALA's Office for Research and Statistics and Tracie Hall of ALA's Office for Diversity explained the survey's findings and analyzed them. A dramatic yet cryptic finding is that “That credentialed librarians under age 45 comprised almost a third, 30%, of the total for that category in 2000, yet accounted for 44% of credentialed librarians leaving the work force, speaks not so much to an inability to effectively recruit individuals to LIS education and practice as to an inability to effectively retain them.” Davis and Hall could not explain this phenomenon. If it persists, it has chilling implications for the profession and for the long-term health of ALA. Tracie Hall was able to say only that there is “something” in the culture of libraries or librarianship that must explain this. But what?
They did speculate that librarians in the under-45 cohort are leaving for careers in K-12 teaching, social work, and other helping and social services professions. Yet anecdote indicates that K-12 teaching and social work are suffering from similar retention problems. Data confirming, denying, or modifying this would be helpful, especially if that would allow for an explanation that is generational, trans-cultural, or some mix of those. This is a mystery to be solved. It has significant implications for our profession and our associations.
October 8, 2006
information technology
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The “Zits” comic strip offers daily vignettes in the life of 15-year-old Jeremy Duncan, his friends, and his parents. Jeremy and his friends are, needless to say, cool and his parents are decidedly not. Parents are an unavoidable albeit frequently embarrassing necessity in every teen's life. The Sunday, October 8, 2006 strip shows Jeremy explaining to his mother, looking perplexed as she listens, how she can log on to the newspaper's Web site, navigate menus, and find a particular comic. Cell phone in hand, Jeremy tells his mom that he'll then text her reaction to one of his friends. Pointing to the newspaper lying on a table a few feet away, she responds, “Or, I could reach all the way over there and pick up the actual newspaper.” Jeremy dismisses this idea, telling her, “Well, yeah, if you want to be all old school about it.” [Note: the link to the comic in the San Francisco Chronicle will probably be good only today.]
This illustrates the twilight time we are regarding in media and generational uses of media. To Jeremy's mom the Web and text messaging are options that lie outside the realm of her habits of media consumption. To Jeremy they are simply a part of the way in which he and his peers converse among themselves and interact with the world at large.
I am rarely home in time to watch the network evening news shows. There was a time–for example, during the Watergate scandal more than thirty years ago–that I depended every day on Walter Cronkite to keep me informed. Nowadays when I see one of these shows, the clearest message is in the commercials; the demographic these shows appeal to is very interested in prescription drug remedies for sleep disorders and other health matters. If Jeremey Duncan watched one of these shows he would probably consider the commercials at best TMI, especially those with Bob Dole as spokesman (definitely not the gender-neutral spokesperson in this case). The format brought to its height by Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw is probably terminally ill, even though it has recently had a Katie Couric transfusion. Nonetheless, it has offered more information and a bit more context for interpreting and understanding information than CNN Headline News. Brevity, speed, snippets–these are in ascendacy.
What are the implications of this for librarians and the ways in which we provide information? IM reference services are well established. When will the teenagers school and public libraries serve and the college students academic libraries serve consider IMing “all old school?” There seems to be a generational divide regarding text messaging. Many young people prefer to text each other than to use the same device for a voice conversation. Older people, out of frugality (me) or because they lived decades communicating adequately without text messaging (me, too), or both, don't use this technology much if at all. How on those tiny cell phone screens can we provide information services that do justice to the information we now convey in IM exchanges by embedding URLs and providing a context for the patron to use that information?
October 2, 2006
reference sources
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Last night we had about ten people visiting our house for a meeting. Lying on a table was a review copy of Melissa Hope Ditmore’s Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work (Greenwood Press, 2006). I cannot comment on it yet, perhaps because the deadline for my review isn’t yet breathing down my neck.
Our guests’ responses, however, were a bit startling. The topic didn’t shock them. After all, this deals with the proverbial world’s oldest profession. But the book’s existence surprised them. It was an epiphany for me. Well educated people, among them a published historian, an engineer, a realtor, and an architect, found a specialized encyclopedia to be a novelty. Having worked among such works for 30 years and having reviewed at least several hundred specialized encyclopedias, I did not appreciate how little members of the general public are aware of such information sources.
This raises questions about how we librarians generate awareness of the range of information they can obtain from their libraries. How can we help members of the public recognize the eclectic range of useful information we offer for them? Many creative, committed librarians work at this every day. Outreach is fundamental to school, public, and academic libraries. How in the age of Google can we let people know how much they can obtain from their libraries that Google cannot duplicate?
October 2, 2006
intellectual freedom
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The Campaign for Reader Privacy has made available a streaming audio file of the September 28 National Press Club program that included Barbara Bailey, George Christian, Peter Chase, and Janet Nocek, the four “John Doe” librarians from Connecticut. They took a valiant stand for the freedom to read and they prevailed!
