Library News, Reviews, and Views
Despite my frustrations with The American Library Association (ALA) Council, I voted in its election. The ALA Council’s email list (ALACOUN) has been endlessly repetitious for weeks. It was spurred by an array of fatuous messages from a chapter councilor fixated on cutting the number of at-large councilors in that august body.
Despite conventional wisdom that conferences held on the coasts draw smaller crowds and complaints from some vendors that show floor traffic was down, Keith Michael Fiels, executive director of the American Library Association (ALA), reported that this year’s Midwinter attendance totaled 10,731. That’s up slightly from 2012’s 9,929 and 2011’s 10,110, though below 2010’s high of 11,095.
Over the past couple of decades, we in libraries have been asking a lot of soul-searching questions about how we can best carry out our functions in a radically changed (and still-changing) information environment. This self-examination has led to many interesting conclusions and some pretty dramatic shifts in the ways libraries do business—almost always in the context of reaffirmations of the library’s core mission and values. Less frequently have we asked ourselves whether the core principles that underlie traditional library service remain relevant and essential in and of themselves.
A mere forty years late, a former American Library Association (ALA) executive director and university librarian finally defended his dissertation.
From the American Library Association Digital Content Working Group:
The report, which was created by the ALA Digital Content & Libraries Working Group (DCWG), can be used by librarians to weigh ebook contract variables most important to their library. The report assesses 15 ebook contract variables of importance to libraries, ranging from ebook title inclusion, to ebook pricing, to immediate patron access. These variables include important ebook lending characteristics, such as ebook revenue streams for publishers and ebook accessibility for people with disabilities.
The American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) today teamed up with 17 other associations, retailers, and charities to launch a new coalition called the Owners’ Rights Initiative (ORI). ORI is an “informal alliance of stakeholders” that will defend the first sale doctrine, which allows libraries to lend books and other materials, as well as individual owners to resell them.
Clara Stanton Jones died on September 30 at the age of 99. Jones was the first woman and first African-American to serve as director of the Detroit Public Library (DPL), as well as the first African-American president of the American Library Association (ALA).
INFOdocket by Gary Price
