Green Kangaroo -- What?

I received an email late yesterday that Mary Ghikas now has a blog. For those who do not know Mary, she is the Senior Associate Executive Director of ALA. [That makes her the #2 staff person there, for those who have trouble parsing titles.]

So far in my Bloglines list Mary has been welcomed by Jenny Levine, Michael Stephens, and now me. Mary was important in the development of ALA's Strategic Plan, ALA Ahead to 2010, and is always on the look out for the trends which will shape both the profession and the association. She was privately very kind to me when I started blogging, and I hope you will take my recommendation that hers is a blog to watch.

You won't necessarily get the inside scoop from the Green Kangaroo, but I can pretty much guarantee thoughtful insights. Welcome Mary.

P.S. I'm still working on the idea of a Bloggers Round Table. Stay tuned.

John Doe v. Gonzales - Premature Jubilation

Upon retrospect, my jubilation over the feds dropping the case in ACLU v. Gonzales (CT) was very much premature. It was focused on the relief that George Christian must have felt to know that he no longer had to keep his secret. I know George (and have even camped with him). He is the Executive Director of Library Connection, an automation consortium in the Hartford area.

Sarah Houghton (Librarian in Black) links to the ALA announcement as well as the summary of the arguments at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. ALA President Michael Gorman is quoted as saying that the government’s timing is “highly suspicious, coming merely a month after the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. The American public should be outraged that the one person in the United States who could have spoken from real experience with a national security letter, and who was seeking to join the national debate, was forbidden from doing so until after that debate was complete.” And yes, I am outraged.

I actually attended the arguments in New York, and wrote about my perceptions at that time. [Unfortunately all newspaper links have expired.] Even the Washington Post links.

Library Journal Star

One of the folks I have had the opportunity to work with through my service on the ALA Executive Board is Ria Newhouse. She was one of two "next gen" librarians who presented to the EB at the beginning of the Annual Conference in Orlando. I found the information she presented interesting and compelling in terms of thinking about how ALA will need to change. That information was an article in LJ that August. Ria was one of the 2004 LJ Movers and Shakers.

Now, she is a cover girl. The current (April 15 issue) has her latest work Professional at 28. [For the record, her birthday is the day before the cover date of LJ. It is an interesting article about her life as an up and coming academic library professional. Read it!

Ria is on my list of recommended candidates for Council. If you have not voted, vote for her....vote for me!

ALA Blogger Round Table - Part 2 (and revised & corrected)

I received a surprising response to my original post (probably because people like the "Stephens'" [Jack and Michael] and Karen Schneider linked to it). Most were overwhelmingly supportive.

Not all were, and that's OK. Jack Stephens criticized my not posting the section from the Bylaws, although I did link to them. His criticism that perhaps this activity should be part of LITA was echoed (and supported) in an email to me from Walt Crawford. Walt gave me permission to quote:

I don't see that blogging represents an aspect of librarianship sufficient to warrant ALA round table status. I do see that blogging represents a use of library technology sufficient to warrant a LITA Interest Group, if anyone wanted to start one.

As a Pastformer President of LITA, Walt has probably forgotten much more about that group than I will ever know. As part of a later exchange, I learned that:

LITA interest groups are open to all ALA members; only the officer[s] need to be LITA members. (And, to the extent that they still use petitions to start LITA IGs, 8 of 10 signatories need to be LITA members.)

IGs, unique to LITA and implemented way back when when we got rid of sections, are more potent than Discussion Groups (they can request budgets and organize programs, and are in fact LITA's primary program-generation source), but they're also self-forming, self-governing, and in every case I've seen run on the principle that "whoever's here is part of the IG, whether LITA member or not."

I trust Walt.

At the same time, it is not just new librarians who can get lost in the complexity of ALA and the divisions...look what just happened to me! I am learning.

I am still collecting information on how to form a Round Table and what a budget would go to, and how it would be constructed. Part of the budget would be needed to pay for conference activities (meeting room support like projectors for a conference program).

I am going to take the long weekend to continue to consider responses. Are there eight to a dozen current LITA members who are willing to take on the leadership of an Interest Group if that is the way to go?

[Addition, 5 minutes after posting] Karen Schneider offers a great post: What a RT Could Do. This captures, eloquently, much of my thinking. Particularly her third paragraph which is what got me started to think about the idea. The comments on this post are worth reading also, with a grain of truth. I'll admit it freely, Karen is a better writer than I. Thanks for the additional thoughts Karen. And as you admit, is this the most important thing? No. Is it a good thing? I'd like to think so.

[Correction 4/14/2006 -- my friend Walt Crawford is not the Past President of LITA, but a former President of LITA.]

ACLU v. Gonzales is now moot

From Al Kagan at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (my alma mater for Library School) comes this great news which I am posting unedited.

From: Susan Searing
Date: April 12, 2006 2:53:07 PM CDT
To: issues@library.uiuc.edu
Subject: Connecticut librarian prevails

*Prosecutors Drop Appeal in Librarian Case*
*By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN*

STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) - Federal prosecutors said Wednesday they will no longer seek to enforce a gag order on Connecticut librarians who received an FBI demand for records about library patrons under the Patriot Act.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit on behalf of the librarians, said it will identify them once court proceedings are completed in the next few weeks.

U.S. District Judge Janet Hall ruled last year that the gag order should be lifted, saying it unfairly prevented the librarians from participating in a debate over how the Patriot Act should be rewritten.

Prosecutors appealed, but U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor said Wednesday that the appeal no longer made sense. The librarian has already been identified in news reports and the
Patriot Act has been changed to include a procedure for requesting an exemption from the nondisclosure requirement, he said. Prosecutors have maintained that secrecy about demands for records is necessary to avoid alerting suspects and jeopardizing investigations. They contended the gag order prevented only the release of librarians' identities, not their ability to speak about the Patriot Act.

The change followed Congress' reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the ACLU noted. "Here is yet another example of how the Bush administration uses the guise of national security to play partisan politics," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "The American public should keep this in mind the next time a government official invokes national security in defense of secrecy."

The Patriot Act, passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows expanded surveillance of terror suspects, increased use of material witness warrants to hold suspects incommunicado and secret proceedings in immigration cases. It also removed a requirement that any records sought in a terrorism investigation be those of someone under suspicion. Now, anyone's records can be obtained if the FBI considers them relevant to a terrorism or spying investigation. The FBI can issue national security letters without a judge's approval in terrorism and espionage cases. They require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and others to produce highly personal records about customers or subscribers.

People who receive the letters are prohibited by law from disclosing to anyone that they did so.
The Washington Post and The New York Times have reported that the FBI issued a national security letter to George Christian, executive director of Library Connection, a Windsor, Conn.-based cooperative of 26 libraries that share an automated library system.

There was no immediate response Wednesday to a call seeking comment from Christian.