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!

Early today I finished reading Susan Patron's The Higher Power of Lucky (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006), Newbery Award winner and the center of a silly controversy–so silly and so well known that I won't rehash it here. Lucky is a 10-year-old girl who shows curiosity, imagination, grit, pluck, vulnerability, and love. Her life in Hard Pan, population 43, in the California desert may seem small compared to the life of an urban child her age, but Lucky doesn't see it that way. In a town with a Cannery Row sort of cast of characters Lucky appreciates each one's quirks while oblivious to her own. She always, but always carries her survival backpack. This would seem odd if she had not lost her mother two years earlier when her mother stepped on a downed power line and was electrocuted and if her father's only contact with her since her birth has been through paltry monthly support checks. She has good reason to feel threatened by the world.

Suffice it to say that this subtly plotted book whose characters win our sympathy is indeed worthy of the Newbery. After reading it one thinks only of them, not of a word that some–many of whom have probably not read the book–have erroneously made the book's focal point. I recommend you read it. You can't help but enjoy it.

Wednesday afternoon in Westwood Village near the UCLA campus I picked up a copy of The Onion, that delightful satirical newspaper founded in Madison, Wisconsin nearly twenty years ago. A headline on the front page grabbed my attention: “Child-Safety Experts Call For Restrictions On Childhood Imagination.”

I immediately connected this to the scorched earth legislative proposals intended to protect children from Internet predators by radically restricting youngsters' access to social networking Web sites. Stifling creative young imaginations isn't the intent of these laws, but that would be their collateral damage to kids. This tongue-in-cheek Onion article advises parents to educate their children about the hazards of exercising their young imaginations. So, like the best satire, it offers a kernel of truth. The danger is not in the childrens' imaginations but in the twisted misrepresentations of online predators. And that is something parents should educate their children about.

And speaking of protecting children from their imaginations–nothing can stimulate anyone's imagination, regardless of age, as much as a good book. Maybe that is the real motive behind the controversy about Susan Patron's Newbery Award-winning book, The Higher Power of Lucky. Perhaps concern expressed about the presence of the word “scrotum” in the book is merely a fig leaf covering its critics' true concern. If they can keep the book out of kids' hands, the book cannot stimulate kids' imaginations. So, if the kids hear about the controversy, that will stimulate their imaginations and curiosity about “that word,” a word that to Lucky, the book's young main character, sounds “like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much.” Wouldn't it be fascinating to find out what it sounds like to kids who don't have the opportunity to enjoy the book? Lucky herself “could never ask about the story of Roy, since she had overheard it. If she asked about Roy, then he [Short Sammy] would know she had been eavesdropping at the anonymous twelve-step meetings” alcoholics, gamblers, overeaters, and smokers held on different days on the patio of the Found Object and Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center in Hard Pan, California. Surely some kids have overheard adults discussing the controversy and heard “that word” said in a way that has inspired them to come up with their own ideas about what it means. But were they to ask what the word means, they would out themselves as eavesdroppers.

Hard Pan's Found Object and Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, mentioned in the book's second sentence, should be enough to stimulate any reader's imagination and make him/her eager to read on. Of course, then the reader will encounter “that word” in the second paragraph and would want to read on to find out how Roy, Short Sammy's dog, fared after being bitten by a snake. (Roy vanquishes the attacker and Short Sammy's wife gets him to the vet in time to save him.) The Onion may be on to something–maybe childhood imagination can be dangerous!

I have read only the first chapter of The Higher Power of Lucky and am looking forward to getting to know Lucky, the colorful characters of Hard Pan, why Lucky has a French guardian named Brigette, and more.

American Libraries Online reported on Wednesday, February 21:

Back in September I reported on the fate of the program proposal I sbmitted for the 2007 ACRL National Conference. In August I received notice that the proposal had not been accepted. Then a month later I received notice inviting us to present our program–this because an accepted program had to drop out for some reason. Bill Miller, Jerry Campbell, Cheryl Laguardia, Brian Mathews, and I will present our program, The Reference Question: Where has reference been? Where is reference going? 8:30-9:30 Friday morning, March 30 the Baltimore Convention Center, room 318-323, a very ample room.

This past Friday I received another e-mail from ACRL staff. This one informed me that “The Baltimore Virtual Conference subcommittee thinks your program will have wide appeal and has selected your program as one of the ten they would like to offer as a live webcast. I'm writing to you today to invite you to reoffer your face-to-face presentation, The Reference Question–Where has Reference Been? Where is Reference Going?, as an online webcast.” Not bad to go from rejection to one of only 10!

The February 2, 2007 edition of the Newport News (VA) Daily Press includes an article reporting that librarians working for the Blackwater Regional Library System receive a starting salary of $21,280. The system will conduct a study comparing its salaries to those of other area public libraries.

There is really no need for a study. The study will, however, provide quantitative evidence to support the self-evident–that $21,280 is a paltry starting salary for a professional with a master's degree (who may be carrying sizeable student debt incurred while earning that degree). A study of salaries in other libraries in the region won't, however, tell the whole story.

The question isn't whether or not the Blackwater Regional Library's starting salary for professionals should be raised. The question is how quickly it can nearly double.

I'll let you know if the paper publishes my letter.