Aaron the Librarian

As mentioned previously, I am on the Reactor Panel for the Presidential Task Force on the Graduated Dues Study. My involvement pre-dates the Task Force creation from while I was a (physically present) “virtual member” of the ALA Membership Committee.

Without having access to the ALA Council III session transcripts I have no idea how this effort was reported to Council; transcripts would be so nice to fact check myself. However, blaming only me for misstatements and errors, from the meeting of the Task Force I attended, in my capacity as a Responder, I recall the following tidbits of information:

• ALA has spent the staff-time equivalent of ~$60K to determine feasibility of Dues study
• ALA is preparing to do a study the feasibility of a member dues structure based on salary or other structures
• Salary-based was one of several models
• Benefits-based tiers (names supplied in this post by me — I forgot what these were really called)
• basic membership=$=a member, only standard discounts on services/publications
• advanced membership=$$=a member, with extra discounts on services/publications
• premium membership=$$$=a member, receiving all services/publications desired at no extra charge
• Keeping the structure we already have (flat fee)
• Others were mentioned but I do not recall how they were described
• The financial hit to the Association of the Study
• Not known how much the individual pieces of the study will cost
• RFI to go out Summer 2007 (probably end of July)
• Consulting teams can bid on all or parts of the project
• If whole project is out of single-year financial feasibility, parts will still be done
• Some prognostications on costs
• I’ve heard numbers bandied about *for the whole project* which come in at ~>$600K
• The history of the project as I know it
• This project is a “member driven initiative”
• It came out of a Membership Meeting where there was a quorum (50+ members, I think)
• I’m told the major sponsor of this program (in the Membership meeting where it was passed) is SRRT
• Council told the ALA Membership Committee to explore this
• Membership Committee (when I was on a few years back) originally sent a report back to Council suggesting that the cost would be prohibitive
• Council told ALA Membership Committee to plan the study anyway
• The project turned into a BARC/Membership Committee Joint Task Force
• Which then turned onto a Presidential Task Force (by ALA President Burger, I believe)
• The Reactor Panel and the Task Force members have finalized the pieces of the project
• The RFI should be announced in late July/early August

Would the outlay of this kind of money be beneficial for the Association?  I’m not sure; I feel more data is better than no data. The question for me is how would this affect the dues for the most people?  I suspect there won’t be all that many people suddenly paying *lower* dues, and plenty of people suddenly faced with higher dues if ALA moves to a graduated dues structure.

A couple of points to remember about this project, the Association staff are not doing this to try to maximize dues revenue; this project is a direct result of a “member initiated initiative;” the timeline for this started at a Membership Meeting right after the quorum requirements had been lowered to a mere 50 people.

Would I like to see a graduated dues structure replace the current flat rate (with exceptions for students, financially challenged, retirees, support staff, trustees, and the other exceptions I’m forgetting)?  I’m not sure.  I feel that if, for the most part, everyone is paying the same rate we all feel like equal partners in the efforts of the Association.  I would not want to see a class-based system based on perceived financial contributions to the Association.

We’ll see how this shakes out.

Just feeling the need to vent a little at my fellow ALA members…

Remember how we were *all* invited to review the look and feel, visual appeal, and all that jazz of the proposed new
ALA.org (<- link is to current sad state of affairs)
website?

Guess how many people (of the tens of thousands at Annual as well as the tens of thousands not at Annual, but on the web) submitted comments?

Go ahead.  Pick a Three. Digit. Number.

I’ll give you the first one: “1″

Did you guess higher than that?  Me, too; silly us.

The total number of survey responses received was One Hundred. Ninty. Four.  (yes, 194)

/vent

(aside: this number gives me a flashback to Snape in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: “Turn to page three-hundred-and-ninety-four.” But, nevermind)

If you’re an ALA member, watch your inbox for another email from ALA with links to a revised (per those 194 comments) mock-up.  If you have suggestions (such as fixing those horrible URLs) make sure to include them in your responses to this opportunity.

If you have nothing else to say about this iteration of new site, please do the survey anyway *and mention that the URL structure needs fixed as often as it seems relevant in the survey*

Those of us who care about that sort of thing (like me) will thank you.

As alluded to in previous posts, the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy has released a magnum opus, the Public Library Connectivity Project: Findings and Recommendations, (153 pages long, 57 pages of report and 96 pages of appendicies) which was commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (I hope this will help guide their future library funding efforts). The report builds upon the findings of the Public Libraries & the Internet Reports (PLIP) and numerous site visits, interviews, and questionnaires conducted over the course of this project.

Grab a beverage, this summary/teaser is long enough to warrant it.  If you plan on digging through the full report, you may want to order in some sustenance, too!
Spoiler alert!
Highlights from the Public Library Connectivity Project: Findings and Recommendations below the fold… (more…)

The ALA Washington Office, Office for Information Technology Policy is looking for a few good volunteers to learn and earn the moniker “Copyright Scholar” on the Copyright Advisory Network.

Here is their announcement (pasted from email and re-formatted)
[begin quoted text]
Call for Copyright Scholar Nominations

The ALA Office for Information Technology Policy is seeking individuals interested in serving as a Copyright Scholar for the Copyright Advisory Network.

The Copyright Advisory Network (CAN) is a Web site (www.librarycopyright.net) and network forum where librarians discuss copyright dilemmas and concerns online. Since 2005, eight librarians have served as Copyright Scholars on the forum. It is time to recruit a new batch of librarians who are keenly interested in copyright and want to volunteer their time to the Network.

Selected individuals will attend an all expenses paid 2-day orientation meeting in Washington, DC, train with the Copyright Scholar class of 2005, and help craft new improvements to the Network. Once you become a Scholar, you agree to devote a small amount of your time (estimated 2 hours a week) responding to copyright queries posted to the Network.  You can decide how long your commitment to the Network will last but it must be for at least one year.

Qualifications for interested applicants:

Expertise in US copyright law and its application in libraries and educational institutions
Excellent writing skills
Flexibility in scheduling time to serve on the Network
Experience working in teams
Permission from your institution to participate

All applicants must be ALA members.

To be considered, send a letter expressing your interest in becoming a Copyright Scholar. Tell us of any special training or expertise you already have that would make you a good candidate for the job.  The Copyright Advisory Committee will select the lucky applicants from the pool of letters received.

Send your letter or any questions you have to Carrie Russell via email at [crussell @ alawash.org].  Deadline for applications is August 31, 2007 (deadline extended).

[End copied text]

If you regularly work with or are at all interested in copyright, please consider submitting yourself for consideration.

As mentioned on Twitter, next week is a vacation week for me. La famiglia & I will be doing the road trip thing.

• Friday afternoon we leave to pick up Ms7 from Girl Scout overnight camp, Friday midnight we arrive in Painsville, OH
• Saturday we’re doing near-Cleveland things
• Sunday we head to Toronto, ON for a a wedding (one of the girls who used to live under my bed while I lived in NYC is getting married), Sunday night (right after leaving the reception) we head for Londonderry, VT
• Monday - Friday doing Vermont things with my parents & sister; possibly catching up with friends from HS and hopefully meeting up with some VT library peeps one evening/night.
• Saturday will be challenging, we have been invited to an end of summer party with friends (and children’s friends) in Shippensburg and had planned to hang in Massachusetts - so we’ll see
• Sunday is “recuperate to be able to go to work tomorrow” day

If you’re in the areas mentioned and want to try to find a time to hang, Twitter DM me.

Came across a link to a post on SaveTheInternet.com which links to a report that debunks Telco-created myths about why U.S. Telcos cannot and should not be encouraged [forced if necessary, imho] to keep the U.S. Internet connections as fast as the very top countries of the world.  The U.S. has slipped in connectivity speed, from 4th in 2001 to 12th in 2006 to 15th in July 2007.  (insert telco whines: U.S. consumer-base too geographically dispersed, etc)In case you didn’t already know, policymakers (with encouragement of telco shills) tend to ignore the research and challenge the methodologies used to collect data or interpret research findings.  Having personally seen this in action (TNDF flashback, see background below) at the state-level, I can attest that though many times the accounts of lobbyists and their questionable practices seem shrill or unbelievable, they do happen pretty much as described.

We, the people, need to get on our elected representatives, appointed functionaries, and faceless bureaucrats respective cases and push for what is currently called “Net Neutrality” to avoid enabling the current duopoly (Telecommunications and Cable Companies) to charge for preferential internet-traffic delivery.  Legislation was afoot which would affect how U.S. consumers and service providers were charged for timely and speedy connections to Internet content and/or infrastructure.

SaveTheInternet is a coalition with occasionally strange bedfellows - just about every political stripe is represented in their full membership list.  If TNDF were still active today, we would likely be a part of the coalition.

[Background info referred to above]
One of the reasons I got involved with ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy (via the OITP Advisory Committee) was my prior experience with Telcos trying to put one over on consumers.  I am a co-founder of the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network (TNDF.net) which was active from April 2003 through late 2004.  TNDF, which sadly saw a significant decline in member activity after our success during the 2003 legislative session, was instrumental in derailing the S-DMCA attempt in Tennessee in 2003 and worked with several large partners in 2004, altering the language of the bill to be less intrusive and restrictive on the end-user.

OITP coordinated the grant (funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) for the Public Libraries and the Internet study, which is performed by the FSU Information Institute.   The study revealed that >98% of Public Libraries are now connected to the internet in some fashion; however, as this project has evolved, the questions this year turned more to the “quality” of the connection (i.e. how phat are libraries’ pipes) and how well do these pipes provide adequate access to libraries’ patrons/customers/users.  Long story short, many public libraries which are part of state-wide consortia or take advantage of E-Rate funding have okay-to-good connections, but many others have generic cable out-of-the-box connections (768kps - 1.5 MBps “Broadband”) and there are still libraries which can only get dialup access (<768kps).

Hey all us Voyager Libraries out there, our friends at Villanova’s Falvey Library just GPL’d their code for their PILOT replacement, VuFind.  This looks great to me, though I don’t have access to the required tools and applications from the documentation on any university servers.

• Apache HTTP Server 2.2 or later
• PHP 5.1.0 or later
• MySQL 4.1 or later
• Java J2SE JDK 1.4 or later
• YAZ 3.0 or later

Anyone in KLN-land have access to all that, some extra disk space, and a hankering to try a consolidated catalog search with facetted browse functionality?  Anyone with a different ILS want to help extend VuFind to your vendor?  The project is looking for help in this area.

From reading Radar O’Reilly today:

Since 1995 the trend in academic libraries for reference queries per FTE and total circulation per FTE is steeply downward. Reference Queries per FTE average out to half of what they did in 1995 and total circulations average out to approximately two-thirds of 1995.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/if_libraries_ha.html

The reference queries to FTE may indicate a broader trend of “not wanting to ask for help;” stemming, I believe (with no data), from the often false assumptions of “I’m okay, I can do this” which are engendered in the current practice of reassurance that kids are okay and can do it during early schooling.

The circulation numbers seem to be from only traditional physical circulations? No mention of electronic resource usage is made. Experientially, I see lots more online accessing of stuff than I do physical items. But I’d love to see more data on this. How much of this kind of aggregated data do you or your library keep?

Since I’m thinking about joining the ranks for the PhD’s, maybe I should save up these questions…

Whoa, reality check, I just saw me listed in some folks’ blogrolls; I’ll admit to a pang of guilt about slacking off the posts again.
Time to ramp back up the ol’ snarky, insightful side and resume posting observations on libraryland, the Association, and stuff I’m finding useful to consider as MPOW goes through our nascent strategic planning processes.

While doing something else at work, came across a SOLINET Planning Committee discussion scenarios(.pdf) and report(.pdf).  As a former employee of a SOLINET library and curious about library management trends person, I clicked through to see what’s on the horizon at the consortia level.

Short-term forecast of what’s happening in libraryland:

• Service model Changing, refocusing on customer service rather than dead-tree repository
• Collection roles Changing to [ just in time / on demand ] instead of just in case
• Staff Transforming to active and service oriented from passive and reacting
• Building Re-purposing to [ multi-purpose / community use ] from dead-tree repository
• Assessment Increasing to better ’splain why the library is needed and what the ROI is for a given community
• Technology [ Control/Timeliness ] to improve services provided and educate community on technology and how to use it

Pages 3-6 of the report(.pdf) detail what the library community should be prepared to learn / know in the next 3-5 years.  The ideas and recommendations are presented with the weight and authority of a Library Consortium, which will hopefully get less-Cluetrained library managers to pay attention and start listening to patrons and staffers who want to move their libraries forward.

Very little of the specifics supplied by the LITA Showcase are listed, but general areas covered by those showcased technologies are mentioned in a broad sense.  The question, as always, is how to get entrenched library interests to accept and apply technologies their changing pieces of librarianship need to move forward and stay relevant to (potential and current) library users?