This morning on the ACRL blog Steven Bell in his “New Members for the Digital Age” post suggested a new type of ALA personal membership. Reactions have varied. Mr. Bell himself is uncertain about the value of this new membership category. He does note, “And while we’re at it we’ll need leaders for this digital age who can figure out what makes sense for the future of our professional associations.”

It is in part because “there are librarians who are organizing to create working groups that can get things done outside of ALA, and are exploiting Web 2.0 technology to do so in ways that ALA and ACRL havent yet explored,” that ALA needs to find new ways to do business. ALA, its divisions, its round tables can benefit greatly from the creativity, commitment, and energy of such librarians.

We need to find an articulation means between these self-directed grass roots efforts and the formal structure through which, at least at present, things get done (or not!) in ALA. I have a few ideas about how we might do that. My main idea is that we have faith in the creativity, commitment, and energy of our fellow librarians to come up with ideas we can try until we get that articulation right

The advantage of ALA membership to entrepreneurial innovators would be that worthy projects, ideas, etc., they develop outside the formal structure of committees and such would come to enjoy the amplifying power of ACRL, ALA, RUSA, LAMA, etc.

Given the hybrid ways in which groups work today, drawing on telecommunications and technologies and f2f interaction, the idea of a “virtual member” is losing its distinction from the idea of a member plain and simple.

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) imposes filtering on public and school libraries that accept federal e-rate funding. Without the e-rate subsidy some libraries would be hard pressed or even unable to offer their users Internet access. The downside is that the filters they have to choose among are all flawed. On the surface it appears that the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2003 decision upholding CIPA was a loss for the American Library Association. That, however, reduces the nuance of interpretation of law to the unambiguous clarity of sports scores. The Supreme Court imposed limitations on CIPA, allowing adults to request that filters be turned off. This was the Court's balancing act, attempting to preserve adults' access to Constitutionally protected speech and to protect children. As John N. Berry III wrote in his August 15, 2003 LJ editorial, “The Supreme Court found CIPA constitutional, but to do so it rewrote that law.”

Given that the Supreme Court ostensibly upheld CIPA, I am glad it also rewrote it. I learned today form a colleague at a major urban public library that she used a filter-burdened library computer to access my ALA presidential campaign Web site. Or, she at least tried to. But the filter blocked her from it! What, I wonder, on my Web site triggered the filter? I cannot guess. I am grateful that this particular filter program in that one library is being modified to allow access to http://rettigforala.org and I hope that many of her colleagues will exercise their restored freedom to read it.