LITA Kerfluffle

I love Karen Schneider. We first met electronically in the early days of PUBLIB. We then actually met in person at a conference, and worked together for a while on ALA Council. I have been reading her blog, Free Range Librarian, for as long as I have been reading blogs. She (along with Rochelle Hartman and Jessamyn West) was part of my inspiration to blog.

Karen has been involved in LITA and tech stuff for a while. She recently posted about ALA's Open Meeting Policy and the whole LITA Kerfluffle (thanks Karen Coombs for that term).

Karen S. was actually at the meeting in question. I was not. I was half-heartedly watching the tweets, and doing other things.

Now, I am a little bit of an ALA Policy Wonk. OK, I admit it. In the past {mumble} years I have not gone to an ALA meeting with out the Handbook in hand, and once pulled it out at lunch in a restaurant.

Post-ALA, I have poked and nudged a few of my friends in higher places about the implications of this very unfortunate scenario.

Karen gets it right, and is a very much better writer than I am. (After all, she does have an MFA in writing...) Here are a couple of quotes which eloquently sum up my take on the issue:

"...the Open Meeting policy has obviously been OBT (Overcome By Technology)." Actually, Karen was lobbying for webcasting the transcription of ALA Council meetings years ago.

"...the more you open your proceedings, the healthier your organization." This is part of why open meeting laws exist for governmental bodies as well.

This quote will not get immediate comment from me, but is strongly emphasized in her post:

ALA as a body needs to immediately point its wonkiest law-making committees at the “open meeting” question, and the response — which needs to happen no later than Annual 2011 — needs to be both informed by ALA values (such as our historical commitment to intellectual freedom) and by our urgent need to stop losing money.

I am all for that, and have done a little poking myself. "One warning to all is that as as rule, ALA committees tend to get focused on the idea that something needs to be made available to the entire association, BY the association, in a uniform manner. I’m all for authority control, but we need to let flowers bloom when they’re ready, and ease up on the argument that “we can’t afford it” because ALA, as an association, can’t personally put a camera in every meeting room. "

Thanks Karen for your (usual) eloquence.

The Car

In the history of my writing, and also earlier in this blog, I often talked about my vehicle. I have not done so very much recently. Even though I drive 80 miles each way, every day to work, my car has been very reliable. It is a Volkswagen Jetta which I purchased almost three years ago in Wisconsin.

Well, yesterday on my way home from work, I passed a milestone: the car turned 100,000 miles. It is definitely the shortest time it has taken me to reach that milestone. The photo above shows the dashboard -- note that I pulled over to take the photo.

Below is the view out the windshield where this momentous milestone was reached...a couple miles west of the I-10 exit for US-61 (Airline Highway). It is the middle of nowhere! If you look on a map, that is very clear.

Here's to many more driving miles in my car!

First of the Year links

I have been back at work for more than a week, and finally feel like I am getting caught up. Here are some of the things I found of interest since I returned:

First, from one of my new favorite, thoughtful bloggers (along with Walt Crawford, Meredith Farkas, Stephen Abram, and a number of others...) Eric Hellman. To close out the year, he talked about "catastrophic future of libraries" and concluded with the forceful statement:

In 2011, let's build things that change the system dynamics.

He also posted about Bridging the eBook-Library System Divide. His post talks about some of the issues facing libraries with providing ebooks, and still keeping their "brand" alive.

I guess that Meredith and I must have been thinking along the same lines, since the day after I posted about the LITA flap, she added thoughtful comments including reflections on her experience with the ACRL Virtual Conference committee.

Iris Jastram has been posting somewhat less frequently than she once did, however, when she "talks," I always sit up and pay attention. One of her more recent posts was about searching, databases, and how we (or for her, undergraduates) look for information. One of the key quotes: "Search is all about term matching, and terms are often the hardest thing for undergraduates to harness." Two other key quotes/thoughts:

1. Google Scholar is very forgiving of bad searching. It will nearly always give you something, even if you enter “impact of cell phones on globalization” into the search box.
2. Disciplinary databases are not nearly as forgiving of bad searching, so they may be pretty intimidating places to start. Where they excel, however, is in foregrounding those elusive, mysterious, and powerful terms that students need so badly if they’re going to revise their searches and gather more disciplinarily relevant material.

This was driven home to me today when a patron came to the desk to ask for "books for women over 50." How do you find that? They are most often classified with the other books on a more specific topic. What did I do? Well, it is not perfect, but I started by doing a "Power" search with the keyword "women" and the phrase in keyword as "over 50." Now, Library of Congress Subject Headings have some issues, and Sandy Berman was often a vocal critic, but I was able to identify that there is an LC subject heading "Middle aged women -- United States -- Life skills guides." Now, I am not a fan of the heading, but it certainly helped me to identify some items to meet that patron's needs. And, it is all about searching, and finding the right terms.

And then there was the whole Bloglines/Delicious debacle towards the end of last year. Stephen Abram, like me, now reads his RSS feeds in Google Reader. Almost three years ago (in 2007), I tried it, and didn't like it. I even went back, after some conversation, and tried it again. Well, I admit that I did not try to move to the new Bloglines platform, and based on Stephen's experience, I am glad that I didn't. Delicious was dead, then it wasn't. I appreciate Stephen's comments on it and the alternatives.

And a final post from Stephen on change within an organization which refers to a FastCompany post and new book: Ten Questions Every Game Changer Must Answer.

David Lee King is doing a series of posts about how to use current technology to do presentations. It is called: "10 Tips to Do Presentations Like Me." He does not use PowerPoint, but certainly everything he says can be done in PowerPoint. Tip #2 is one that I use for my web presentations, presenter notes. I recommend the whole series (which is not finished yet!).

ALA has a library. It serves as the resource for ALA staff and volunteer leaders, but it often gets questions from outside that sphere. American Libraries has a feed which often includes questions that the Library receives, a recent one was about recommended web sites for libraries.

One of the non-library blogs I follow is called Principled Innovation. Jeff De Cagna posts on ideas to help organizations/associations to deal with change. This is a recent post which is the first of a series and a response to a white paper for the Wisconsin Society for Association Executives.

Now, in my various travels recently I have neither had the full body scan nor pat down. But I have to admit liking these items:

• In November, George Stroumboulopoulos blogged about 4th Ammendment Underwear;
• Here is a link to the official sale site; and
• Finally a t-shirt that says "I got to Second Base with a TSA Screener."

ALA Executive Board member Courtney Young wrote a great post on running for ALA Council. You most likely have until the end of the month to get your petition with 25 signatures in to appear on the ballot this spring.

And in a final moment of randomness, the State of Connecticut has cut all funding for tourism promotion. As a result, they dropped the state's membership in Discover New England. So the new map simply omits Connecticut from the map.....read it here.

New Technology, Open meetings? Not at LITA

I have seen some of this on Twitter, and on a blog, but I am very concerned about something that happened at ALA Midwinter.

Here is the tweet which caught my attention:

griffey I was requested, a motion was made, and the LITA Board of Directors voted to have me cease streaming and recording the Board Meeting.... 11:59 AM Jan 8th via HootSuite

Michelle Boule (Smith) posted about it on her blog, and I encourage you to read it and the comments. (14 comments at this writing, including one of mine.)

For those who are not familiar with ALA and its structure, LITA (Library & Information Technology Association) is a division of ALA. (Here is a brief discussion of ALA's divisions from my ALA 101 series.) For the business inclined, divisions are "wholly-owned subsidiaries" of ALA. Therefore all of ALA's policies apply to the divisions and their meetings.

The ALA Policies (7.4.4 for the governance geeks) require that all meetings of ALA and its units be open to members and the press. It is very simple, and very simply stated.

What happened? Well, Jason Giffey, on his own initiative and with his own equipment, started to stream and web-cast the LITA Board Meeting. Now, except when discussing "matters affecting the privacy of individuals or institutions" this meeting should have been open. If he had not been a Board member, and had just wandered into the meeting, he would have every right to record and stream the meeting. I would use as analogy of what would happen if a news report, or even citizen, walked into a City Council meeting. (It is the example which first occurred to me probably because of my extensive public sector experience.) It is a public meeting and the public has the right to know.

Jason backed down when the LITA Board got upset. A part of me respects his doing that since he is a Board member and needs to continue to work with the Board. However, another part of me is very sad that LITA took this stand.

LITA is supposed to include librarians on the cutting edge of technology. "Big ALA" has been wrestling with opening up governance and ALA Council meetings. Here was a chance for LITA to take the lead and show how it can be done, and done effectively, and at very little cost. They blew it.

Karen A. Coombs commented in a similar vein on the broader topic of the relationship between virtual and physical participants.

I heard the argument stated that the reason for shutting down the web-cast was that a consultant was presenting a report which was copyrighted. I say: BALDERDASH! If LITA hired a consultant to write a report, and based on what I know about standard ALA contracts, any copyright remains the property of the division -- as far as the consultant is concerned it is a "work for hire."

If Norman Horrocks were around, he is the one I would turn to first. I am going to urge my colleagues on the ALA Executive Board to look into this. I consider it an egregious violation of the ALA Open Meetings Policy.

Read and Listened to: July - December 2010

You will note a continuing pattern (if you look at my prior lists), more listened to, and fewer read. Somehow my time for reading is being gobbled up by other activities, while my commute continues to let me listen to many titles.

So, without further ado, here is the list as cut and pasted from the sidebar:

Books read:

1. The spirit catches you and you fall down: a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures by Anne Fadiman
2. The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection by Michael Ruhlman
3. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
4. The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
5. Save the Last Bullet for Yourself: A Soldier of Fortune in the Balkans and Somalia by Rob Krott [A review here]
6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner [Did not finish]
7. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell
8. The year before the flood : a story of New Orleans by Ned Sublette
9. Folly by Marthe Jocelyn a review copy

Books listened to:

1. A venetian affair by Andrea di Robilant, read by Paul Hecht with Lisette Lecat and Jeff Woodman
2. White coolies by Betty Jeffrey, read by Beverley Dunn
3. Benjamin Franklin: an American life by Walter Isaacson, read by by Nelson Runger
4. Sima's undergarments for women by Ilana Stanger-Ross, read by Vanessa Hart
5. Call me Ted [sound recording] by Ted Turner with Bill Burke, read by Ted Turner with Ted stories read by Nick Sullivan ... [et al.]; featuring a conversation between Wolf Blitzer and Ted Turner
6. The inimitable Jeeves. Vol. 1 by P.G. Wodehouse, read by Martin Jarvis
7. Full circle by Michael Palin, read by the author
8. The witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, read by Mary Beth Hurt
9. The daughter of time by Josephine Tey, read Derek Jacobi
10. A wrinkle in time by Madeleine L'Engle, read by the author
11. A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole, read by Barrett Whitener
12. One dangerous lady by Jane Stanton Hitchcock, read by Barbara Rosenblat
13. The devil's advocates: [greatest closing arguments in criminal law] by Michael S. Lief and H. Mitchell Caldwell, read by full cast
14. Things I overheard while talking to myself by Alan Alda, read by the author
15. Cataloochee by Wayne Caldwell, read by Scott Sowers
16. Peak by Roland Smith, read by Ramon de Ocampo
17. "Hello", lied the agent: and other bullshit you hear as a Hollywood TV writer by Ian Gurvitz, read by the author
18. Rocket men: the epic story of the first men on the moon by Craig Nelson, read by Richard McGonagle
19. Secret confessions of the Applewood PTA by Ellen Meister, read by Lisa Kudrow
    Stone cold by Robert B. Parker, read by Robert Forster
20. Mates, dates and portobello princesses by Cathy Hopkins, read by Melissa Eccleston
21. Committed: a skeptic makes peace with marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert, read by the author