I have been rereading Benjamin Franklin’s  Autobiography.  Franklin wrote that in 1742 he “invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering.” He wrote and published a pamphlet describing and promoting his invention. Its lengthy title concludes with “and all Objections that have been raised against the Use of them answered an obviated.” Franklin did not lack self-c0nfidence! The royal governor of Pennsylvania “was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove…that he offered me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, p. 92.)

Franklin understandably took mild umbrage, however, over “An ironmonger in London however, assuming a good deal of my pamphlet, and working it up into his own, and making some small changes in the machine, which rather hurt its operation, got a patent for it there, and made, as I was told, a little fortune by it.” (pp. 92-93)

Would that the Creative Commons license had been available to Franklin in 1742!

Earlier this month I had the privilege to participate in the annual conference of La Asociacion Mexicana de Bibliotecarios (AMBAC) in Chihuahua, Mexico.  I learned that the issues librarians in Mexico face are, for the most part, the same issues librarians in the United States face today–continuing education, funding, preservation, development of digital collections, education for librarianship, adequate staffing, advocacy, and getting their communities’ attention so that those they serve can know about all they can receive from their libraries.  The biggest challenge appears to be adequate staffing and educational preparation for public libraries.  Only about 10 percent of the public libraries in Mexico have a staff member who has a license in librarianship and only about one percent hold a degree equivalent to the American MLS.

I thank AMBAC’s officers, its members, and the people of Chihuahua for their hospitality.

Last night Diedre Conkling shared the URL for an ALA Committee on Organization (COO) document about electronic participation and ALA’s open meetings policy.  I don’t recall if she posted it to the NMRT List, the Council list, or both.

Early this decade there were members who objected to committees doing any work outside of the ALA Annual Conference and Midwinter Meeting.  COO responded by defining “meeting”–basing the definition largely on Sturgis–in a way that clearly excluded asynchronous email exchanges and listserv discussion from that definition.  The definition, approved by the ALA Council, is part of ALA policy.  At the time it was proposed and passed, it was intended (and I believe still functions) as a permissive policy/definition.  It makes it clear that a lot of work done outside of the f2f meetings at Annual Conference and the Midwinter Meeting is not a meeting and therefore not covered by the open meetings policy.  In the absence of that definition, some contended that email discussions and the like violated the open meetings policy.  (I’ll keep my comments to this narrow issue and not comment on open lists, an issue COO did not discuss at the time.)

The issue is broader than the open meetings policy.  It is about participation opportunities, not just meetings.  Early this decade COO (while I served as its chair) chose to take an incremental approach to virtual (a term I personally dislike) participation.  The committee took that approach because the political realities at the time were that incremental is the approach that could win support from the majority of the committee and the Council.  To learn more about the issue’s background and contradictory opinions that members expressed at the time, see the collection of COO documents (including the one Deidre cited last night) at http://tinyurl.com/4lbp2h.

The ALA Policy Manual, the ALA Bylaws, and the Sturgis parliamentary manual all play roles in this.  It is my understanding that the electronic participation task force that Janet Swan Hill chairs is taking another look at how these intersect and their implications for policy.

Two things have unquestionably changed in recent years—new technologies and member’s use of these technologies.  A third change, which may be generational, is members’ desire to experiment and explore new modes of participation using these and emerging technologies.

Meanwhile, we have policies, bylaws, etc., on the books.

I have ideas about these issues. I have given them a good deal of thought for a number of years.  I haven’t yet prepared my inaugural speech for July 1; I’ll share my ideas then.

Please join me in Anaheim in July for a planning session to strengthen our approach to advocacy for our libraries.

As incoming president of ALA, I have been busy developing initiatives for my 2008-2009 term. I am seeking your assistance in developing one of these initiatives in particular:  advocacy for all types of libraries.

I believe that we need to sustain and strengthen our advocacy efforts on behalf of all libraries. I think of our school, public, academic, and other types of libraries as parts of an integrated library ecosystem. If one part of the system is threatened or suffers, the entire system is threatened and suffers. We know that libraries offer incredible lifelong learning opportunities, yet no one type of library can deliver learning opportunities from cradle to grave. Through our library ecosystem, however, we offer these opportunities in abundance. No other agency in American society can offer lifelong learning opportunities as effectively as our libraries!

How can we convey this message to decision-makers and the public, at large? How can we strengthen our efforts for the benefit of every type of library?

We’ll begin to answer those questions at a planning session at the ALA 2008 Annual Conference in Anaheim, hosted by the ALA Office for Library Advocacy. Please join me, Carol Brey-Casiano, Chair of the ALA’s new Advocacy Committee, and Marci Merola, Director of the new ALA Office for Library Advocacy, at:

• Advocating for All Libraries: Saving the Library Ecosystem
• Saturday, June 28, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• (Location to be announced)

Please RSVP to rsvp@ala.org no later than June 9, 2008; write “Planning Session” in the subject line. For more information, please visit www.ala.org/rettigadvocacy.

See you in Anaheim!

On March 13 I testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on behalf of ALA and the Association of American Law Libraries.  The hearing was held by the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Science and Technology Committee.  Complete information about the hearing is available on the subcommittee’s Web site.
In the days immediately before the hearing I received drafts of my testimony from the ALA Washington office staff, edited those drafts and raised questions and returned the drafts.  Phone calls supplemented this iterative process.  I also had a call from two senior Democratic staff members of the House committee.

The purpose of the hearing was to gather evidence on the Environmental Protection Agency’s response to date to its sudden closure of some of its libraries in 2006.  Because this was an investigative oversight hearing, the witnesses were required to stand, raise our right hands, and swear to tell the truth.

I had testified before another House subcommittee for ALA in October.  That hearing dealt with a variety of issues related to the Library of Congress, including the process it follows in making significant changes in cataloging policies.  Testifying before a Congressional committee is one of those things that is a bit daunting the first time. But after that initiating learning experience it is easy.

I was one of five witnesses.  The others represented the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a union of professional employees in EPA, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the EPA.  Rep. Brad Miller of North Carolina chaired the hearing.  At times he was the only member of the House present.  There were a number of concurrent hearings on March 13 vying for their presence.  The minority party was represented by Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas.  Mr. Miller was well informed about the topic and made an opening statement that laid out the issue in brief; Congress had told EPA to restore its library system and Congress was not happy that it has not received evidence of progress.
Each witness had five minutes to make an oral statement.  This was an abbreviated version of the text of the full testimony document submitted for the record prior to the hearing.  Mr. Miller was prudently indulgent, allowing witnesses to run over the House five-minute limit for oral testimony.  Despite many revisions and deletions to those drafts that went back and forth between Washington and Richmond, mine ran 5 minutes and 30 seconds–a good 30 seconds briefer than any other witness.

After all five witnesses had made our statements, Mr. Miller and Mr. Hall each had five minutes to ask the panel questions.  Mr. Miller started out by addressing the EPA representative and noted that four witnesses had one interpretation of the situation and EPA had another significantly different interpretation.  Four of us had painted a picture of secrecy, intransigence, and indifference by EPA; EPA painted a picture of a situation that the rest of us wish were true.  Mr. Miller asked a number of pertinent questions of the witnesses.  Mr. Hall took about half of his allotted question time. Mostly he complained about the slowness with which EPA makes decisions about permits for oil refineries in Texas.  It was clear from Mr. Miller’s facial expressions as he listened to the witnesses as well as from his questions that he was not pleased with the current state of affairs.  He grilled the EPA witness on the process by which it is putting together a report due to Congress on March 31.  Apparently a lot of work remains to be done on that report.  He also advised the other witnesses to clear our calendars on March 30 and 31 in case EPA really follows through and asks stakeholders for comment on a draft of the report, one of the steps EPA says it plans to take.

My time on behalf of ALA and its ongoing fight to assure citizen access to government information was time well spent.  I know it was a lot more fun to be one of the other witnesses than it was to be the EPAs witness!

For a summary of ALA’s position on the issue, see its Washington Office’s "District Dispatch" blog and scroll down to the March 13 entry.

Several years ago the American Library Association launched online communities software developed by another national association. ALA’s online communities never really caught on. The software was not intuitive and many users found it clunky and sometimes confusing. So it was very welcome news from Jenny Levine last week that ALA has put our an RFP to migrate the communities to Drupal. This will offer much needed flexibility lacking in the old software. As it develops My ALA will give members greater and greater opportunities to interact, learn, contribute, and collaborate.

For the past 20 years I have lived in Williamsburg, Virginia, home to Colonial Williamsburg. An excellent time to visit CW (as locals call it) is January and February, especially Super Bowl weekend. It seems that weekend there fewer visitors than any other. The CW interpreters are able to give their few visitors a good deal of attention and take the time to answer questions. I took advantage of the Super Bowl weekend lull to spend a day in CW. In one building I an another visitor enjoyed a leisurely, private presentation.

In the course of the day I became reacquainted with the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of Virginia, adopted in Williamsburg June 12, 1776 and June 29, 1776 respectively. That Bill of Rights, a powerful precursor to the U.S. Bill of Rights, articulated our valued, deeply held intellectual freedom principles. Its 12th item states:

That the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.

And its 16th and last states, in part:

That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence, and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience…

Just as New Yorkers proverbially take the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island for granted and neglect the opportunity to visit them and learn, Williamsburg residents take CW for granted and neglect the opportunity to visit and learn. It is good to be reminded of the provenance of our ideas, especially when they lie so close by.

One of the reasons we participate in conferences is to learn. Participating in the ALA Midwinter Meeting as ALA’s president-elect is definitely a learning experience!

I have had opportunities to learn about ALA from a variety of perspective, each of them informative in a distinctive way–as a division president, as a member of Council, as chair of the Committee on Organization (COO), as a member of the Budget Analysis and Review Committee (BARC), as a member of the ALA Executive Board, as a candidate for ALA president, and in other roles. All have helped paint a fuller picture of this incredibly complex organization.

We learn on or own and we learn from others. Both fellow ALA members and ALA staff are wonderful teachers for a president-elect. Since May staff have been helping me understand the role and responsibilities of the president-elect. More significantly, they have helped me transform ideas for presidential initiatives into programs and to create a realistic budget to carry out those programs

Fellow ALA members proved to be good teachers in two ways. I had the opportunity to meet with a number of ALA committees, especially those focused on advocacy efforts and a group in the Emerging Leaders program, to describe those initiatives. Members’ questions have helped me refine my thinking about those initiatives. Some responsibilities rest distinctively with the president or the president-elect. Among those is presiding over Council meetings. While president Loriene Roy was in New York to appear in the Today show with this year’s winners of the Newbery and Caldecott medals, I presided at the second meeting of the ALA Council. Suffice it to say that it was a learning experience. I imagine that meeting was also a learning experience for the new members of Council.

I also learned, as next year either Linda Williams or Camilla Alire will, that sleep is not a major part of the schedule of an ALA president-elect during the Midwinter Meeting. I suspect that is a lesson that will be renewed at the Annual conference, at next year’s Midwinter, and at the 2009 Annual Conference. At the same time, it was an exhilarating experience! It also had a lot in common with my experience as a candidate at the 2007 Midwinter Meeting. Then and again this year I had the rewarding opportunity to meet a wide range of ALA members and hear their concerns and ideas. What did I learn from both of those Midwinter experiences? I learned that ALA members are committed to our profession, to our Association, and to building a vibrant future for both.

Earlier this evening I posted the following to the ALA Council list:

On behalf of the Council Committee on Committees, I am pleased to inform you that the following Councilors have been slated as candidates for the upcoming 2008 Midwinter Council Executive Board Election:

Frances R. Roscello
Information Literacy Consultant
Roscello Associates
Rensselaer, NY

Diane R. Chen
Library Information Specialist
Hickman Elementary School
Nashville, TN

Thomas L. Wilding
Professor of Practice and
Associate Director for Academic Programs
School of Information Resources and Library Science
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

Dora T. Ho
Young Adult Librarian
Los Angeles Public Library
Los Angeles, CA

Pamela C. Sieving
Biomedical Librarian/Informationist
National Institutes of Health Library
Bethesda, MD

Em Claire Knowles
Assistant Dean for Student Administrative Services
Simmons College, GSLIS
Boston, MA

Thank you to these nominees for their willingness to be candidates and, if elected, to serve on the Executive Board!

Three (3) candidates will be elected to three-year terms on the ALA Executive Board; their terms will begin at the 2008 Annual Conference and will end at the 2011 Annual Conference. Additional nominations may be made from the Council floor. (See the ALA Bylaws, article III, sec. 6(c).)

Immediately following the ALA-APA Council meeting at the 2008 Midwinter Meeting, there will be an Executive Board Candidates Forum on Monday, January 14, 11:30 AM-12:30 PM, Pennsylvania Convention Center (PCC), Ballroom B. The forum gives Council members an opportunity to hear the views and to ask questions of the Executive Board candidates prior to voting. Please attend the forum!

Balloting will begin on Monday, January 14 at 5:30 PM and conclude on Tuesday, January 15 at 4:30 PM. Please participate in the election! The election results will be reported at Council III on Wednesday, January 16, 2007.

Five (5) councilors are needed to serve as tellers for the election. If you would like to volunteer to serve as a teller to count the ballots, please contact Lois Ann Gregory-Wood, ALA Council Secretariat, at lgregory@ala.org. The process should take about an hour or so. The ballots will be counted at 4:30 PM on Tuesday, January 15.

The other members of the Committee on Committees, elected by Council at the 2007 Annual Conference, are:

My thanks to these colleagues for their excellent work in putting together this strong slate of candidates!

Thank you,

Jim Rettig,
ALA President-Elect
Chair, Committee on Committees

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.