Jason Griffey

I was going to comment on Jenny’s post concerning the ALA and conference fees, but my thoughts seem irrelevant in the face of Meredith’s incredible post. Excerpts below, with small amounts of commentary:

Librarians sacrifice enough by being librarians (and getting paid so little) that it’s not their duty to serve the ALA. Librarians should help their patrons. They shouldn’t have to make little money and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice their financial well-being or the well-being of their family so that they can speak at a stupid conference.

Bravo! There’s not a single librarian that couldn’t be making more money in another profession, and I’d be willing to say that goes triple for those of us on the tech edge of the world. We’ve make individual choices to come to this profession, and we shouldn’t have to further our financial burden in order to share the knowledge we bring to it.

In the past, there were certain ways that librarians contributed to the profession. They wrote articles for professional journals, they served on committees for professional organizations, and/or they spoke at conferences. The first option involves research and time. The latter two involve travel, expense, and time. Is that the only way to contribute to the profession these days?

Here’s a topic near and dear to my heart. As a new academic librarian, I have things like tenure and reappointment to worry about, and “what counts” is a huge deal. Does my blogging count towards “forwarding the profession”? I’d like to think so, but I’d be willing to bet that my committee might not feel that way.

They spend more than $25 million on payroll and operating expenses alone! And I would feel really good about that if I thought that the ALA was doing a lot of good. But I don’t see it. And I certainly don’t see them representing a younger generation of members. When there is talk of a shortage of librarians rather than a shortage of entry-level jobs (which is the reality), new librarians feel betrayed. When the ALA is so behind technologically and its President insults basically anyone interested in any sort of online publishing, digitization, or Web design, techies feel betrayed. When the ALA doesn’t lobby for better pay for librarians, those of us who barely make ends meet feel betrayed. What does ALA stand for? Who do they help? It is an organization that represents libraries, not librarians.

Why do we need the ALA? Is ALA really relevant anymore? Does anyone really feel like ALA represents their interests? At my job, none of my colleagues has been to an ALA Conference and have no interest in going. They seem to consider the ALA pretty irrelevant. And that perspective is only confirmed when the only thing the ALA Council can seem to accomplish is passing a resolution on Iraq!!! The ALA is a huge organization that is hard to understand, hard to feel a part of, and hard to know what it stands for. I paid out-of-pocket for my membership this year, but it will certainly be the last unless the ALA changes. But they won’t.

This again has been rattling around in my head for some time. I re-upped my ALA membership recently, in the belief that making change happens more easily from the inside. But I can see a time when that membership letter comes, and I decide that my $150 is better spent on me than on the nebulous ALA. It’s clear that the ALA needs to change, especially in the face of an upcoming generation of librarians who are largely questioning of their purpose and direction. When the older generation leaves the profession, where will the ALA be then?

No, the world is not ending, I simply was convinced by kgs’s recent post. I expected to find the article she quoted from and rant again about Gorman’s lack of technological understanding.

Instead, I’m going to agree with him.

On one, very small point. And probably not in the manner he’d like.

In an article in the San Fransisco Chronicle, Gorman is quoted as follows:

“If you look at the Encyclopedia Britannica, you can be fairly sure that somebody writing an article is an acknowledged expert in that field, and you can take his or her words as being at least a scholarly point of view,” said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and dean of library services at Cal State Fresno. “The problem with an online encyclopedia created by anybody is that you have no idea whether you are reading an established person in the field or somebody with an ax to grind. For all I know, Wikipedia may contain articles of great scholarly value. The question is, how do you choose between those and the other kind?”

Gorman thinks the answer for academia lies in encouraging students to think critically. “Anyone involved in higher education will tell you one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance (by students) of anything that’s online,” he said.

It’s that last line that I agree with, but I’d like to make an addendum. I’d prefer to say “Anyone involved….will tell you that one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance.”

Period.

What I want to know is: why should we be teaching our students to blindly accept anything? When we’ve had example after example after example of print sources being spurious, why should we not be teaching students to verify their research no matter what the source. That’s certainly what I’m teaching…verification is evaluation as it relates to information. Blind trust of any source is a problem.