Names, Nick

The Well Dressed Librarian has a great post with this title! As one who is a "Michael" not "Mike" I can very much identify with him! I can tell a sales rep who has never met me is calling when he says "Hi, Mike!"

One of my email accounts has a sig file with "My friends call me Michael!" as the end. Remember that!

A New Adventure

I'm in a new city, and there is a lot to learn. Fortunately I was accepted into the Chamber of Commerce' program Leadership Eau Claire. I expect that it is similar to the program in Bridgeport called Leadership Greater Bridgeport, and the Eau Claire experience comes with high recommendations from those who have participated in the past.

The end of this month will see the two day retreat. Then it will be once a month through the fall, winter, and spring. I expect to get a lot out of the experience, and to learn a great deal more about my new hometown.

ALA's Call for Committee Volunteers

Have you ever wanted to serve on an ALA Committee? Well, now is the time to get your name in for committee appointments which begin after ALA Annual in Anaheim. Most member are appointments for two years, and chairs are appointed for one year as chair (and may or may not already be members of that committee).

So....what committees are included? Well ALA has a page listing all the association-wide committees. There are two kinds of committees: Council and Association. The only difference is who decides. The Committee on Committees (elected by Council from its membership) appoints to the Council committees. The Committee on Appointments appoints the other committees. The Committee on Appointments is made up of the President-Elect of each division. You can fill out one form for both committees at once, and it is now an interactive form. Here is the text of the email which has begun to make the rounds:

ALA President-Elect Jim Rettig is seeking applications and nominations for appointments to 2008-2009 ALA and Council committees.

He will fill slots on the following committees: Accreditation; American Libraries Advisory; Awards; Budget Analysis and Review; Chapter Relations; Conference; Constitution and Bylaws; Council Orientation; Diversity; Education; Election; Human Resource Development and Recruitment Advisory; Information Technology Policy Advisory; Intellectual Freedom; International Relations; Legislation; Literacy; Literacy and Outreach Services Advisory; Membership; Membership Meetings; Nominating (Deadline for Nominating Committee applications is September 1, 2007); Organization; Orientation, Training, and Leadership Development; Policy Monitoring (current Council members only); Professional Ethics; Public and Cultural Programs Advisory; Public Awareness; Publishing; Research and Statistics; Resolutions; Rural, Native and Tribal Libraries of All Kinds; Scholarships and Study Grants; Status of Women in Librarianship; Website Advisory; ALA-Children's Book Council (Joint); ALA-Association of American Publishers (Joint) and ALA-Society of American Archivists-American Association of Museums (Joint). Committee charges can be found in the ALA Handbook of Organization.

All applicants must complete and submit the electronic 2008-2009 ALA Committee Volunteer Form. The form is available on the ALA web site. The deadline for submission of committee volunteer applications and nominations is Monday, December 3, 2007, which the exception of the Nominating Committee, with is September 1, 2007.

Geographical location, type of library, gender, ethnicity, previous committee work (not necessarily with ALA), ALA and related experience, and other factors are considered when the committee slates are compiled in order to ensure broad representation and diversity on all committees. The ALA Committee on Committees and Committee on Appointments will assist ALA President-Elect Jim Rettig in making appointments. Committee appointees will receive appointment letters after the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, PA. Appointees will begin their committee service after the 2008 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA.

Questions concerning appointments can be directed to ALA President-Elect Jim Rettig at jrettig@richmond.edu or Lois Ann Gregory-Wood, Council Secretariat, at lgregory@ala.org

Go for it. If you don't ask, you don't get!

Bridges -- Money can solve problems, how does that help libraries?

I've started (again) to catch up on reading blogs through my aggregator.

One of the first I always look at is Free Range Librarian. Karen is a good friend and a great writer. One of her recent posts led me to Garrison Keillor's article "Bridges aren't supposed to fall down." At one point he says, "The way to get money to fix a bridge is for it to collapse and kill people, and so Congress promptly awarded Minnesota $250 million for the fallen I-35W." And he is right.

I guess there are several things that bug me about this: first, a bridge collapsed in Connecticut in 1983, and I have seen very little reference to that. (Here is the Wikipedia article, which is pretty good. Note that one of the links at the end is to the NTSB report on the collapse. Note that it was a full year after the collapse before a report was issued.)

Second, the solution is to throw money at the problem after the fact. Fat lot of good that does for those who died.

The third thing is that libraries are always looking for money. Most libraries are either underfunded or limited in what services can be provided because of funding restrictions. For those working in areas with strict "tax caps" one of the (I believe, unintended) consequences of voter imposed limitations like Proposition 13 (in California) and Proposition 2 1/2 (in Massachusetts) is that library services compete with police, fire, and other social services. Part of the bigger picture is that funding libraries will reduce crime and the need for social services, it will create more jobs and a better economy. We, as librarians, just have not made the case well enough, yet.

My rant for the day is over....who know what is next.

Books Read -- January - June

To clean up my sidebar, I am cutting out and pasting below the list of books I read between January and June 2007.

• Village of the Dammed: The fight for open space and the flooding of a Connecticut town by James Lomuscio
• The Turkish Lover: A Memoir by Esmerelda Santiago
• Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich
• Bake Sale Murder by Lelsie Meier
• Calling it quits: Late life divorce and starting over by Deidre Bair
• The handmaid and the carpenter: a novel by Elizabeth Berg
• What my mother doesn't know by Sonya Sones
• A practical handbook for the boyfriend: for every guy who wants to be one, for every girl who wants to build one! by Felicity Huffman & Patricia Wolff
• The Dewey decimal system of love by Josephine Carr
• Death of a maid : a Hamish Macbeth mystery by M.C. Beaton
• Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury [for the Big Read in Eau Claire]
• The Last Town on Earth: A Novel by Thomas Mullen
• BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine by Margaret Cho, Lisa Jervis, and Andi Zeisler
• The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and its People by Ben Logan
• The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron [The 2007 Newbery Medal Winner]
• Lord of the Libraries by Mel Odom
• Reptiles in Love: Ending Destructive Fights and Evolving Toward More Loving Relationships
• Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World by Linda R. Hirshman
• Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic by Esther Perel
• Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry
• The Mermaid Chair by Susan Monk Kidd