The Chinese American Librarians Association invited me to participate in the 2008 Sino-US Forum for Library Practice in Kunming, China.  Its co-sponsors are the Library and Information Committee for Academic Libraries of Yunnan Province and the library of Kunming University of Science and Technology.

Among the speakers from China, all of them directors of university libraries, the survival of the academic library has been a recurrent theme.  Mass digitization projects—both those well known in the US such as Google’s and the Internet Archives’ Million Books project—as well as significant projects in China have prompted questions about the viability of libraries that are known for their extensive print collections complemented by access to online databases, many offering a wide range of full-text content.

Again and again they cited the need for libraries to digitize the unique and special items in their special collections as a way to demonstrate the distinct contribution each can make.  They didn’t address issues about the library’s survival once these collections are digitized and as widely available as the contents of the Million Books project.  They also cited copyright restrictions as limitations on the usefulness of digitized book collections.

One library director outlined her strategy for assuring that her university will value the library’s contribution.  Dr. Jinhau Shen, chief librarian at Tongji University in Shanghai described a unique outreach program.  As China continues to industrialize and its own people become a larger and larger market for its products, information becomes more important to emerging industries such as automobile manufacturing.  Tongji University’s library has initiated discussions with local auto manufacturers to learn what sort of business, engineering, and scientific information they need.  It has developed partnerships to provide that information.  This library has found a void and filled it.  It demonstrates its value by providing needed information to an industry that is very important to the nation’s future.   It expects to have competitors in the future, but also thinks that its experience as a pioneer will give it a competitive advantage for some time to come.

I commend Dr. Jinhau Shen and her staff for their innovation and strategic thinking.  It has identified an underserved, perhaps even unserved, community and has developed services that will contribute to the community’s success.  I don’t advise every US academic library to imitate this example of providing information services to a local industry.  But we do need to act in the same spirit.  Dr. Shen’s presentation made me wonder who are the underserved or unserved in my library’s community?  Perhaps they are individuals within the groups we strive to serve, especially faculty and students?  How do we identify those individuals and how do we reach them?  This isn’t a new question nor one we have ignored.  But it is proving difficult to answer.  Yet answer it we must.

Technorati Tags: library users,libraries in society

Every library operates today in a very competitive environment. Google, Yahoo, etc., compete with us in bringing information seekers and information sources together. More than that, we have competition for people’s attention–Internet surfing, television, radio, telephones, innumberable ads in every medium conceivable, video games, text messages, and on and on. If we can connect with people in the communities we serve long enough to get their attention and demonstrate to them how through our services and resources we can add value in their lives and work, we can hook them as library users and advocates.

I had a number of conversations with colleagues in October at the New England Library Association conference in Sturbridge, MA. One was about a library user is is hooked on her public library to an extraordinary degree. A librarian at a Massachusetts public library told the story of a very loyal user who depends on telephone reference service for a variety of information needs. One day this user was in an auto accident. Who did she call on her cell phone immediately after the accident occurred? The reference staff at her public library! She asked what she should do. The librarian who took her call made sure she wasn’t hurt and then advised that she should call 911.

Not many library users are that hooked (or perhaps in this case, dependent) on their libraries. But it is a wonderful example of how, once we demonstrate our value to an individual, that individual is hooked on the value of library service.

Congress is back in session after its August recess. Help your senators (senator, if you are in Idaho) and House representative do something really worthwhile back in Washington. Write to them and urge them, if they have not done so, to cosponsor the SKILLS Act, the Strengthening Kids' Interest in Learning and Libraries. The House bill is H.R. 2864 and the Senate bill is S. 1699.

The SKILLs Act will correct on of the deficiencies of No Child Left Behind. It will add school librarians to the “highly qualified” personnel schools should have to comply with NCLB and require school districts, to the extent feasible, to ensure that every school within the district employs at least one highly qualified school library media specialist in each school library. When Congress passed NCLB it was either not aware of or chose to ignore a large body of research that has demonstrated in study after study that student achievement is higher in schools that support their students with a well funded, professionally staffed school library.

I can summarize the main trends in my life the past several months quite succinctly:

• Most of March: Spending many, many hours at my wif'e's bedside in the hospital, doing what I could to help with her care and dealing with the hospital bureaucracy on her behalf.

• Much of April: Spending a good number of hours helping with my wif'e's care at home as her gradual post-hospitalization recovery began.

• May: Still spending time helping my wife as she gains strength each day, but spending a lot of time catching up on work that was set aside for a month or more. I am very grateful that the University of Richmond allowed me to complete personnel reviews two weeks past the deadline.

Future steps in recovering those parts of my life that I am not yet able to juggle? Keeping up with my Bloglines alerts, posting more here, antebellum courses up for the next year to serve ALA members as their vice-president/president-elect elect.

Yesterday ALA announced its 2007 election results. By a margin of 125 votes I was elected vice-president/president-elect. Thank you to the 7,033 ALA members who expressed their confidence in my with their votes–especially the last 125 who voted for me!

At first I was a bit stunned by the news, but it is now sinking in. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity! It will also be a great responsibility to represent ALA’s 62,000+ personal members and to be the association’s principal spokesperson. Fortunately I have wonderful models in our current and past presidents.

There was something special in learning the election results just a few blocks from the US Capitol while in Washington, DC, for yesterday’s legislative briefings in preparation for today’s annual ALA Legislative Day lobbying. Democracy is one of ALA’s strengths and our larger democracy is a reason libraries, library workers, and ALA are very important to our society.

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.

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!

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.

As I noted here when reflecting on and expressing a bit of wonder at my candidacy for ALA president, the rettigforala.org site that launched on October 29 was, shall we say, “aesthetically challenged.” That is a polite way of saying that it lacked good design. It was the best I could produce left to my own devices. It did demonstrate, however, that I am a prolific content provider. Today–thanks to the very generous work of my talented son-in-law, Garrett Bowhall, a graphic designer in Chicago, and the technical help of Kevin Creamer of the University of Richmond–rettigforala.org has a new look! To call it a great improvement understates the change. Thank you, Garrett and Kevin!

I am also grateful to the many colleagues who have written or called to congratulate me on my nomination and to offer their support. If you haven’t yet heard back from me it is because I am still working through all of the emails.