ALCTS Network News v6n21 (January 19, 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/ann/ann-v6n21 ISSN: 1056-6694 ALCTS NETWORK NEWS An electronic publication of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services Volume 6, Number 21 January 19, 1994 In this issue ALCTS BOARD OF DIRECTORS HAS ITS OWN LISTSERV DRAFT ALCTS UNIT RESPONSE TO THE ALA SELF-STUDY COMMITTEE ************************************************************************** ALCTS BOARD OF DIRECTORS HAS ITS OWN LISTSERV The ALCTS Board of Directors now has a listserv set up to receive comments from members and to discuss issues among itself. Anyone with an e-mail account can send messages to the ALCTS Board of Directors at ALCTSBD@UICVM.BITNET or ALCTSBD@UICVM.UIC.EDU. This list is unmoderated, but only the members of the ALCTS Board of Directors, both elected and ex-officio, are subscribers. If you send a message to the list, replies will go back to you only--unless the Board member replying to your comment copies his or her comments to the list as well. Some information-only documents are being distributed to the Board on the listserv instead of in paper form. Included in these is the current draft of the ALCTS unit response to the ALA Self Study Committee. The rest of this issue of AN2 is taken up with this document. Please send your comments on this draft to the ALCTS Board of Directors at alctsbd@uicvm. [Note for active members of other divisions: If your division is also preparing a unit response, here are the e-mail addresses of the other division executive directors for you to send any thoughts you have in relation to your other divisions: AASL & YALSA Ann Weeks u56748@uicvm.uic.edu ALTA & ALSC Susan Roman u57218 ACRL Althea Jenkins u55385 ASCLA & RASD Cathleen Bourdon u55381 LAMA Karen Muller u19466 LITA Linda Knutson u55383 PLA George Needham u22540 ] ************************************************************************* DRAFT ALCTS UNIT RESPONSE TO THE ALA SELF-STUDY COMMITTEE The document that follows is the second draft of the ALCTS response to the ALA unit self-study survey. The ALCTS Executive Committee reviewed the responses received prior to their meeting at the beginning of November and offered edits to that draft, along with some additional comments. The draft as it now stands folds in all the comments received in the ALCTS Office, except that those being addressed through the ALCTS reorganization process or which are more internal to ALCTS than generalizable to ALA have not been included. This document will be on the ALCTS Board agenda for the first Midwinter meeting (Saturday afternoon) so that it can be discussed by section executive committees and further refined at the third Board meeting. The office will prepare the final response for approval by the executive committee during February. This is the response that will be sent to the ALA Self-Study Committee in March 1994. ******************************************** 1. What are the three most important contributions that ALA makes to enable your unit to carry out your priorities, programs, projects, and objectives? [must be reduced to three!] * ALA provides an organizational framework for the members to function in by handling logistical and administrative support and local arrangements for organization of the midwinter and annual meetings and for educational programs, preconferences, institutes, workshops. * ALA meetings serve as a spot for contact with colleagues from professionally and geographically diverse areas and provides a forum for organized discussion, reporting sessions, planning, and action on shared concerns. * ALA supports work on standards development. * ALA publishes materials prepared by division committees for members both of the division and the profession generally. * ALA, through the Washington Office, influences legislation on issues of importance to libraries. * ALA serves a public relations and advocate function for issues of importance to the profession, including the announcement of upcoming meetings. 2. What are the three most significant constraints that the current ALA imposes upon your unit that limit your effectiveness in carrying out your priorities, programs, projects, and objectives? [must be reduced to three!] * ALA is too big to be effective and there is too much top-down management from, leading to poor management overall. The upper levels of the bureaucracy get in the way of members functioning, due to an unwieldy and time-consuming authorization process. * Slow response time and poor communications between and among ALA and its units, particularly the divisions. * Proliferation of competing units and subunits across the Association. * The extensive lag time between the completion of a manuscript approved for publication by ALCTS and its publication by ALA Publishing Services. * Poorly defined strategy that constantly changes. * The high price of ALA to members. This includes the price of membership, publications, and attending conferences, preconferences, and institutes. Why is ALA putting on activities members can't afford to attend? What can have higher priority and take up all of ALA's resources so that prices must be so high? Activities should be for the benefit of the members, not purely to raise money so that the organization can perpetuate itself. 3. How could ALA be changed to enable your unit to work more effectively to achieve your goals, priorities, and objectives? * Since members do not have significant time to devote to ALA work year-round, the best use of ALA meetings is to gather and share information and build professional consensus, and to use committees to work only on high priority issues/activities that will have concrete outcomes to benefit members. * Refocus of association efforts on "bread-and-butter" concerns such as salaries, working conditions, performance standards, more lobbying for library funding, and more training/education activities, the role of the library in the information age, censorship and intellectual freedom issues. * Discontinue services that are not high priority and which do not directly support education, information gathering/dissemination, and production of publications and other products. Decrease association activity on secondary (and often non-consensual) issues, e.g. Persian Gulf War, library design awards, etc. * Enable decisions to be made between meetings and at the lower levels of the organization, not always the division or ALA level. Make this much more of a bottom-up organization and truly empower the membership Streamline red tape, particularly authorization and review processes. * Encourage ALA staff to provide more proactive help to members to help them navigate the intricacies of ALA bureaucracy. * Consolidate units along functional lines so people in one area (e.g., collection development) do not need to join three divisions within ALA. * ALA ought to encourage better coordination among ALA, the divisions, and individual committees and other groups and encourage the merger of committees and other groups with common or related interests. * Provide more extensive leadership training for ALA members. * Provide technology to support work during non-conference periods. * Utilize state and regional organizations to improve communication from and about ALA. 4. What changes within your unit would enable you to be more effective in carrying out your mission? (vision, goals, objectives?) In recent years, ALCTS has undertaken an intensive review of its operations through the Task Force on Organizational Structure. We are continuing to review the recommendations of that Task Force and attach a copy of its final report for your review. 5. What three things could ALA do to encourage collaborative planning among units? [must be reduced to three!] * Cap the number of meetings at any given conference. * Analyze overlap among units and make a review of potential overall mandatory before setting up a new "critter." * Make it easier to know what other units exist and where the commonalties might be; continue to improve data in the ALA Handbook of Organization so that it is easier to know who to contact. * Develop a means by which information about ALA Divisions and the associated subunits can be conveyed to the members. [Note: ALA is likely to be supporting Gopher access to electronic information on all units within the calendar year.] * Make it easier to work across organization lines by allowing Rgrass rootsS collaboration and encourage such cooperation by giving budget decision priority to those proposals that come from collaborating units. * Design a means of inter-divisional communication, making available information on the activities of the various committees in all divisions. * Less tightly scheduled meetings could help by opening up slots for joint meetings, thus encouraging groups with common interests to meet jointly. Having fewer "no conflict" slots would allow new meetings to be fitted in. If people want to go to the protected "no conflict" events, they will. If the only way people will attend them is to forbid any other activities, then ALA should reconsider whether those protected activities are really of any interest to anyone. 6. What is the number one priority for your unit for the next three to five years? How does this affect your relationship with ALA? [just one!] * The ALCTS priority should be to help equip its members to meet the needs of their positions and their institutions more effectively and efficiently. * In terms of relating to ALA, for ALCTS the priority should be how to structure itself to relate to the needs of its members, how to become more dynamic, effective, and responsive to the members. Once that is figured out, then ALCTS can figure out how it can and should relate to ALA. If ALCTS fails to find a structure that serves all of its members, it will lose members, and all of ALA will suffer as a result. * Address the continuing education needs more aggressively than ever before, as the roles of technical services librarians will continue to change rapidly necessitating a greater number of training and retraining programs. 7. What changes in your constituency do you see in the next three years? How does this affect your relationship with ALA? * ALCTS members have a growing number of avenues for professional activity--other divisions, collateral organizations (NASIG, SAA, ARL, EDUCOM), cross-departmental work at home institutions, or cooperative ventures with one's home institution and others. We are competing not only for membersU time for ALA involvement, but for their membership as well. * As the work in libraries changes to involve a greater number of paraprofessionals or support staff in career positions, it becomes critical to extend educational opportunities, both formal and informal, to this group. * With tighter budgets and easier electronic communications, the way we interact with ALA and how we view the role of central ALA will change. Members will expect to get more value for their money. Tighter budgets mean fewer members can attend national meetings, institutes, etc, but electronic communication is helping to bridge the gap and make it easier to accomplish work. Local and regional meetings will also become more important. * ALA must find room for, and must address the needs of, librarians from small and non-academic institutions. ALA should be providing resources and programs for members of all financial levels, not just those able to afford to attend the meetings and pay the high prices of pre-conferences and institutes. * As we come to depend more and more on commercial (or contract) services rather than in-house staff, ALA should be providing a place to develop partnerships with the commercial sector and involve them in our issues. 8. Please comment on any other factors that will help your unit be successful in ALA. * ALA is much too big and is grappling with that fact by trying to remind itself what its purpose it and how to execute it, much less do it well. * To be successful within ALA means knowing what priority we have to ALA; there is no point gathering energy and talent and setting goals if ALA won't support us. ALA must decide its priorities and what its resources can support. The fact is ALA can't do it all. Burn out is real, in our libraries and in ALA. * Consistent strategic vision and clearly communicated priorities are a must if units are to focus their energies for the common good. * Do we really need to have two full ALA meetings annually? Or could we make expanded use of technology to facilitate standards setting, program planning, and continuing education out-reach between conferences. * We need to determine how to capitalize on diversity, expertise, and economies of scale that are the benefits of a large organization, without the impeding bureaucracy of a large organization. * ALA might also consider setting aside some space in American Libraries for divisions to communicate the most significant activities, (similar to the space that is set aside for reporting the activities and announcements of the ALA Washington Office.) Such communication could lead to more joint divisional activities and draw larger audiences. * The ponderous "feel" of getting action completed is an element of size--it's a darned large organization. ALA Council is so large that it is often ineffective. Perhaps there should be more than one council to represent the various divisions--deliberations can be more focussed. My guess is that the various constituencies often have such varying agendas that a "Net Zero" is the result of many deliberations and discussions. ************************************************************************* ************************************************************************* ALCTS NETWORK NEWS (ISSN 1056-6694) is published irregularly by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association. Editorial offices: ALCTS, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; Jennifer Younger, President; Karen Muller, Executive Director. Editor: Karen Whittlesey (u34261@uicvm); Editorial Advisory Board: Liz Bishoff, Jennifer Younger, Robert P. Holley; Editorial Assistance: Karen Muller, Yvonne McLean ALCTS NETWORK NEWS is available free of charge and is available only in electronic form. Opinions expressed in the articles are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the division. News items should be sent to the editor at the e-mail address above. To subscribe, issue the network command "tell listserv@uicvm sub alcts [your name]." Back issues of AN2 are available through the listserver. To find out what's available, send the following command to LISTSERV@UICVM: send alcts filelist Send questions about membership in ALCTS to the ALCTS Office, u34261@uicvm. All materials in the newsletter subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be reprinted or redistributed for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or education advancement. For other reprinting or redistribution or translations, address requests to the ALA Office of Rights and Permissions, 50 E. Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611. *************************************************************************