ALA seeks candidates for 2008 election

July 31, 2007 American Library Association No Comments

I am sure that this email I received today from Loida A. Garcia-Febo has had wide distribution. It deserves the widest possible distribution. Please share this information with your colleagues. Consider submitting your name to be a candidate for the ALA Council. Serving on Council gives ALA members a unique view of the organization, including some of its foibles.

The ALA 2008 Nominating Committee is soliciting nominees to run on the 2008 spring ballot for Councilor-at-large. The Councilors-at-large will serve three-year terms, beginning after the 2008 ALA Annual Conference and ending at the adjournment of the 2011 Annual Conference. Members who wish to make nominations should submit the followingi nformation:
nominee name
present position
institution
address
telephone
fax
and e-mail address.

Self-nominations are encouraged. All potential nominees must complete the Potential Candidate Biographical Form. Nominations and forms must be received no later than September 1, 2007. Nominations may be sent to any member of the 2008 Nominating Committee. Committee members are:

W. Lee Hisle, Chair
Vice President of Information Services & Librarian of College
Connecticut College
E-mail: wlhis@conncoll.edu

Nancy Bolt
Nancy Bolt & Associates
Golden, CO
E-mail: nancybolt@earthlink.net

Tyrone Heath Cannon
Library Dean
University of San Francisco
E-mail: cannont@usfca.edu

Jon E. Cawthorne
Associate Dean
San Diego State University
E-mail:jcawthor@rohan.sdsu.edu

Alma Dawson
Professor
Louisiana State University
E-mail: notaed@lsu.edu

Karen E. Downing
Foundation and Grants Librarian
University of Michigan
E-mail: kdown@umich.edu

Loida A. Garcia-Febo
Asst. Coordinator, Special Services
Queens Library, Jamaica, NY
E-mail: loida.garcia-febo@queenslibrary.org

Dale H. Ross
Trustee, Ames [IA] Public Library
E-mail:dross24704@aol.com

Jennifer A. Younger
Edward H. Arnold Director of University Libraries
University of Notre Dame, IN
E-mail:Jennifer.A.Younger.1@nd.edu

To encourage diversity and leadership development, the Committee will refrain from nominating current Councilors for election to another term. However, the Committee encourages all current Councilors who wish to continue their service to the Association to file as petition candidates. Petitions will be available from Lois Ann Gregory-Wood, Council Secretariat, ALA, 50 E. Huron, Chicago, IL 60611, Email: lgregory@ala.org, or during the 2008 Midwinter Meeting. Petitions require 25 signatures of current ALA members.

A Senator comes to his senses

July 24, 2007 Intellectual property No Comments

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Sen. Harry M. Reid ( D-NV), the U.S. Senate's majority leader, yesterday backed away from his intent to introduce an amendment to the Higher Education Act, currently under consideration for reauthorization. His proposed amendment would have imposed special burdens on a small number of colleges and universities, deemed by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America to be the worst “enablers” of questionable P2P downloading. The amendment would have required these 25 institutions to “review their antipiracy tactics and to make plans to adopt 'a technology-based deterrent' to peer-to-peer file sharing.”

Higher education lobbyists succeeded in heading this off. One of their arguments was that technology alone cannot resolve this issue. Nor can the higher education community address it alone. Nevertheless, the music and film industries seem intent on drafting American higher education as their copyright cops. All of us in higher education have a responsibility to teach our students proper respect for intellectual property, including an understanding of their fair use rights. We do not, however, have a responsibility to the RIAA and the MPAA to hold our fingers in a dike while they cling to increasingly untenable business models. The recording and movie industries need to take stock of the realities of the current technological landscape, the evolving culture, and a growing social and artistic movement they cannot contain. If they do this rather than insist that academe save them from change, maybe they will come up with some ideas and strategies that will allow them to continue to generate revenue at the same time they acknowledge and foster the creativity of mash-up culture. But I wouldn't bet on that happening before the dike bursts.

Science abandons JSTOR

July 22, 2007 publishing industry No Comments

Several months ago Nature dramatically hiked its price for academic library consortia. It was a case of robbery. Nature had already forced consortia to empty their wallets to meet one price increase. Not content with that, Nature the demanded that those libraries turn over their ATM card, lead them to the money machine, and surrender their PIN so Nature could take everything to meet the subsequent increase. Nature may score some short-term financial gain through this approach. But it is clear that the losers will be the members of the academic community.

Now Science has shown similar disregard for the good of the academic community and the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge. It is severing its relationship with JSTOR I imagine that in the months ahead Science will offer subscribers a “special offer” to license its online backfiles. Perhaps Nature and Science have the strength to flex their publishing muscles and bully libraries. Other journals and publishers, fortunately, don’t have the same cachet. That does not mean, however, that they won’t follow the Nature and Science bad examples.

Below is a large excerpt from the announcement that Michael Spinella, JSTOR’s executive director, sent out on July 20, 2007:

Dear JSTOR participants and other respected colleagues - I am writing to make you aware that, after a very productive association of nearly 10 years, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has decided to discontinue its relationship with JSTOR, effective December 31, 2007. The AAAS and JSTOR began working together in 1998 to include Science and Scientific Monthly, a related title that has ceased publication, in the JSTOR archive. During this time, access to the backfiles of Science and Scientific Monthly has been greatly expanded through the availability of the JSTOR Health & General Sciences collection at over 1,000 institutions as well as at 600 other organizations through our special programs providing the full JSTOR archive to secondary schools, public libraries, museums and institutions in developing nations. Libraries have also had the opportunity to repurpose shelf space and lower costs associated with long-term storage and access to these older materials.While JSTOR is disappointed with the AAAS’s decision, we anticipated that there might someday be publishers that would choose to end their participation in JSTOR. JSTOR is an archive, and its publisher license agreements reflect this fact. As an archive, JSTOR’s role is to provide a reliable, accessible, digital collection to library participants and their users over time. For those institutions that have access to Science and Scientific Monthly through JSTOR when this decision takes effect, JSTOR will continue to provide an accessible and useful archive of the preserved AAAS material in perpetuity. This ongoing right is part of all of our publisher agreements.

I want to call your attention to several key details.

For institutions that have access to Science and Scientific Monthly through JSTOR prior to December 31, 2007 (including those institutions that elect to participate in the Health & General Sciences collection or join our secondary schools, developing nations, and other special programs between now and then):

  • No content will be removed from the archive. JSTOR will continue to preserve Science from 1880 to 2002, as well as Scientific Monthly, which was published from 1915 to 1957.
  • The Moving Wall will become fixed. With the addition of the 2002 issues in early 2008, JSTOR will cease to digitize and archive any further issues of Science.
  • Access will continue. JSTOR will continue to provide access to Science from 1880 to 2002, as well as to all issues of Scientific Monthly. This includes supporting persistent links to articles in Science and Scientific Monthly from online resources and web pages. As is the case today, links need to be made directly to JSTOR or through link resolvers. Please note that Science and Scientific Monthly (as part of JSTOR) are not currently indexed by search engines such as Google.

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    Differences between blogs and journals?

    July 19, 2007 blogs and blogging No Comments

    CogSci Librarian Stephanie Willen Brown raises interesting questions in “Blog- Or Print Publishing?” Her key questions are:

    What I wonder is … does it matter that librarians are writing more on blogs than in print? That by the time our ideas are in print, they are almost old news? Who is the audience for print library literature, anyway? Is it those of us in the biblioblogosphere? Is it those of us who want more detail than our old eyes can read online? Is it those of us who don't read library blogs but need (arguably) to keep up with what the young'uns (and I mean young-at-heart, creative, if you will, rather than age-young) are thinking and doing?

    I imagine that the readership profiles are very similar for blogs and for the “print” literature, much of which is available online–at least for subscribers. Readers of blogs probably also read journals and readers of journals probably also read blogs. Rather than a question of print vs. blog, I think it is a question of edited and distributed by a third party compared to (not versus) the self published. Edited publications have a gatekeeper, either an editor or an editorial board and referees, and the gatekeeper decides what gets published. Bloggers themselves make those decisions about their own work. Either way, quality varies!

    One difference is longevity. The tried-and-true print journal is archived by and in libraries. We don't yet have that sort of dependable system for archiving e-journals. However Portico and LOCKKS are addressing this problem. We do not yet, however, have the large scale system for preserving e-journals, blogs, and other born digital works equivalent to the widely distributed system we have for archiving print journals. Until we do, perhaps we should hope that authors who produce works that will stand the test of time will submit those to journals, especially those that still produce a print edition, and that their work will be published there. It may, of course, be hubris for an author to assume higher work should enjoy that sot of longevity. The print journals has shown considerable staying power, although that is waning in favor of electronic journals.

    Will the journal, as has many have predicted, disaggregate and lose the value of journal title as brand and implicit indicator of authority? If so, the differences between blog posts and journal articles will diminish, with the role of the editor continuing to distinguish one from the other.

    P.S.: Stephanie, I had to do some digging to find the line you attributed to me in your July 17, 2007 post. I finally found it on my laptop in my notes for my opening statement at the Candidates' Forum during the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle. My notes include: “Today some librarians publish in blogs rather journals, create communities of interest on Yahoo, and produce specialized conferences on the Web.” I know that If you heard me at any of the 40 groups I visited during Midwinter, you may have heard me say it then. So, maybe I am the one who should be humbled when I “try to help patrons who don't remember where / when they read something.”

    Family matters

    July 11, 2007 personal No Comments

    Family matters sometimes matter to the virtual exclusion of other matters.

    I did not post anything here between late May and July 10. The last post in May discussed the RIAA's use of colleges and universities as their copyright enforcers. I wrote that post in a hospital room as my wife slept after being admitted in the early afternoon. More than ever she needed an advocate as I witnessed errors by the nursing staff, errors with her and also with another patient. These things mattered a great deal. Dealing with bureaucratic bungling kept me at the hospital till midnight one night; I was unwilling to leave until I knew the staff had corrected the problem. Family mattered a great deal for the nine days she was in the hospital.

    Eight days after coming home, she was back in the hospital. Two days later she had some serious surgery, an option that had been held as a last resort since mid-March. Family mattered then, too. Our son and his girlfriend were with my wife and me when she went into surgery and when she came out of recovery. We are very optimistic, even on the brink of being confident, that she has finally turned the corner in this long illness that has sapped her of her strength, necessitated daily injections, and been very scary at times. Family mattered five days after she had surgery and our older daughter came to care for her mother. We had we made plans weeks earlier for her to be with her mom for a week so I could go to the American Library Association conference in Washington. Little did we know that part of that time she would be attending her mother in the hospital once again.

    My wife's short-term recovery from the surgery was unexpectedly and blessedly swift, a real turning point. Family mattered the next week when she and our daughter joined me in Washington for a day just so they could come to the ALA inaugural banquet. She rallied her strength and walked in at my side when I was introduced as president-elect. I am sure that more than half of the applause that greeted us was for her.

    I have been very touched by the concern that many of my colleagues have expressed for my wife's health in recent months. I don't accept family as a suitable metaphor for the members of any institution or organization other than a family. Family matters too much to dilute it in that way. But the applause in Washington that night demonstrated what I have long known–that colleagues matter, too. Thank you, colleagues near and far, for your support for my family! It has mattered and meant a lot to us.

    Technology–great when it works

    July 10, 2007 information technology No Comments

    I have my laptop back!

    Actually, I have my hard drive back in my laptop. From July 3 through late yesterday I had a loaner hard drive. On July 3 my laptop repeatedly froze as soon as I entered my password. The university Help Desk staff worked on it all day. They replaced the BIOS. They ran diagnostic and repair utilities. A dedicated technician stayed late with me to isolate the problem. By swapping hard drives between two identical machines we were able to conclude that the problem wasn't in my laptop hardware but in one of the many drivers and applications that launch at start-up. He was able to move the files I most needed to my network storage, install the other machine's hard drive in my laptop, and move those most needed files to that drive. I had to use the less-than-friendly Outlook Web interface and I discovered just how much I depend upon customized tool bars, shortcuts, and my Merriam-Websters 11th Collegiate Dictionary. It was a very tedious process for a technician to identify the offending software and delete it from start-up.

    My hard drive is back and I once again have access to the software I need to post to Twilight Librarian.