I have spent a large part of each of the past 17 days, two in a community hospital, and the rest in a major teaching hospital dealing with the bureaucracy and assisting with the care of a family member with a very serious illness that had a very sudden onset. I or another member of the family has taken responsibility each evening to call and email others in the family to update them. The emails, reflecting their authors' individual styles, each tell a story about one day in the patients' and family members' lives.

In this cell phone age, while sitting in waiting rooms, especially on a floor housing five specialized intensive care units, one inevitably overhears others' narratives about their patients and families. Hearing heart wrenching stories about multiple injuries to victims of horrific automobile accidents or about a father and grandfather who has been taken off of life support after being declared brain dead provides no solace, even though one's own family member is not in as serious a condition. Overhead narratives about injury and illness can, of course, engender empathy between strangers. But those strangers are not family.

Narratives shared within a family, however, engender unity and add to familial shared experience. It doesn't matter what those narratives relate–the story of a life-threatening illness, of an embarrassing moment that one would like forgotten but others will never forget, of the joy of a wedding or a birth. These family narratives create the shared story and experience of related individuals, even of those who did not experience an event first-hand but learn it through repeated tellings and the embellishments they acquire. Art is essential to life, for without the art of narrative, we would have difficulty making sense of our shared lives.

If you are a member of the American Library Association, you may already have received an email from the ALA ELection Cooridnator with the subject line “2007 election login information below.” If you haven't received it, it should arrive March 16 or 17.

A major theme of my campaign for ALA president is expanding opportunities for member participation. Our election is every member's opportunity to participate in our association's democratic process. Please participate by voting!

And while you are voting, please vote for Jim Rettig for ALA president!

I have unexpectedly spent the past eight hours with an ill family member at our new local hospital, the first six of those hours in the Emergency department. The hospital opened in October and I had hoped not to have reason to set foot in it for years to come. But you know the saying that “life is what happens while you are making other plans.” So it is sometimes.

I have never been the emergency patient, but nonetheless am grateful I can still count on one hand my experiences with emergency rooms . If you have ever been to a hospital emergency room, you know that the TV depiction of a swarm of medical personnel attending to patients “stat” does not reflect the reality of waiting and waiting and waiting and…waiting punctuated by brief interactions with medical personnel, almost always one staff member at a time.

ALA's Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) celebrates its first annual Teen Tech Week March 4-10. This is a great idea. Technology has incredible appeal to many teens. Do teens, like the adults described in OCLC's 2005 Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report, primarily associate the library with books? Whether they do or not, Teen Tech Week is a commendable new venture. If it engages teens with their school and public libraries in ways they haven't been engaged before, that is an important step toward engaging them for the rest of their lives. It also has the potential to expand other teens' perception of the opportunoities their libraries offer for them.

YA services librarians are doing some of the most creative outreach work in our field. Maybe academic and public adult services librarians can learn from Teen Tech Week and other creative initiatives our YA colleagues have developed.

“Fair use” and “RIAA” are words that rarely appear together. I am my university's registered DMCA agent. So I appreciate intellectual property rights and the flagrant disregard (or ignorance) some have towards those rights. I also own the rights to intellectual property I have created. And I appreciate fair use and how it is threatened today. On February 27 in Congress Reps. Boucher [D-VA] and Doolittle [R-CA] introduced the FAIR USE Act of 2007 and the following day the RIAA announced that it is starting a campaign to inform college students that it is readying lawsuits against them charging them with illegal fire sharing and downloading. These are not necessarily in conflict with one another. Nevertheless, at some point the RIAA needs to ask itself how long it can keep its thumb in the dike before it recognizes that it needs to find a new business model that will work for it, for the artists and others it represents, and for consumers who are quick to recognize the opportunities new technologies offer.

Reps. Boucher and Doolittle have introduced this same bill in vain in earlier Congresses. Let's hope that their colleagues see the wisdom of their proposal. After all, in every Congressional district there are more music consumers among the voters than there are individuals who make their living from the RIAA's eroding business model. Tell your representative what is wise and what is fair and urge them to cosponsor the FAIR USE Act.

Earlier today I posted on YouTube a video for my campaign for the presidency of the American Library Association

I hope you enjoy it! And one more thing–I ask for your vote!