From: CCHAMBER_at_neu.edu
: Sheila Intner's Response to Charles Willett's Posting, part 2
PART TWO
THE LONGER ANSWER
One of ALA's 11 divisions, Association for Library Collections &
Technical Services (ALCTS) is associated with activities that frequently are
outsourced, such as obtaining library materials, cataloging, binding, etc.
But ALCTS is not a political action group with an anti-outsourcing agenda.
It is a professional association whose rightful business is (1) educating &
informing its members & non-member colleagues about work-related topics; and
(2) facilitating creation & dissemination of practical tools. It does
business via publications (both print & electronic), interaction at
conferences and regional institutes, and the activities of its chapter
affiliates.
The outsourcing resolution presented to the ALCTS board unequivocally
damned outsourcing and praised locally-performed selection. When the flawed
wording was questioned, AIP representative Patricia Wallace, who kindly came
to present it & answer questions, said we all knew what it really meant, and
didn't clear up the problems. The board voted not to endorse it. (I
wouldn't have voted for it either, but that day I couldn't vote because my
term of office had not yet begun.)
One bad outsourcing contract doesn't make all outsourcing bad. Some
local-librarian-selected collections are good, some are not. Working for
more than a decade as a collection consultant, I personally have seen
local-librarian-selected collections that could have benefited from
vendor-selected alternatives. Outsourcing & selection power, by themselves,
are neutral. When either of them is done properly, it's good; when either is
done badly, it isn't. Who performs the work or where it's done doesn't
assure goodness or badness.
Why didn't ALCTS support AIP's anti-outsourcing resolution? Simple. It
wasn't -- & isn't -- supportable by librarians who catalog with OCLC (or
RLIN, or WLN), collect materials via approval plans (including Baker &
Taylor's), bind books and journals with commercial binders, subscribe to
journals via EBSCO, Turner, or Faxon, or exercise other opportunities to move
the more mechanical aspects of our work to cheaper venues. When the goals of
selection are sharply & clearly defined, selection of individual titles can
be merely a matter of matching against the selection parameters, which
shouldn't require the attention of local librarians to do. But the Hawaii
contract failed to define selection goals, failed to insure that local needs
could be met, if necessary, by alternative means, failed to give local
librarians opportunities for input before the contract was signed, & failed
to allow local librarians the right to ask for corrections if problems
emerged. Even all of this still doesn't justify the unfortunate wording of
the AIP resolution. It seems to me that if AIP wants support for its
resolutions, it needs to listen AND RESPOND to objections raised by potential
supporters. It wasn't surprising that the take-it-or-leave-it attitude I
observed in San Francisco didn't produce the desired support.
MORE ANSWERS
To answer your questions about where ALCTS has been -- it's been working
hard doing its rightful business for its members. And from what I saw in San
Francisco, it is succeeding wildly. How do I measure success? I measure it
in terms of participation. The ALCTS Membership Meeting/President's Program
drew so many people the hotel filled a second ballroom accommodating the
overflow crowd. That's success to me.
ALCTS should educate and inform librarians about outsourcing via
conference & regional programs on the subject & publications, which is what
President Carol Chamberlain described in her June 6 statement.
What ALCTS should NOT do is meddle in one library's affairs, or
unilaterally, without invitation, interfere in fights between library
directors & their staffs, or between libraries & their vendors.
Received on Thu Aug 28 1997 - 10:34:21 EDT