ALA Midwinter Meeting - Seattle, January 2007

By Doc Roth

Librarians zealous about running their national professional organization flock to the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting each January. Okay, they also attend the ALA Annual Conference in June, but Annual is broader. In addition to sessions about running the ALA and its divisions, Annual includes more sessions on providing patron services, handling technical services, the latest developments in the digital environment, and other topics that concern the profession of providing library services to patrons. In contrast, Midwinter focuses largely, although not exclusively, on the administration, organization and operation of the ALA.

The ALA is so big that librarians with a great variety of interests can and do find areas of the organization where they want to devote their effort. At the outset, there are at least a dozen major areas of the organization where work can be done. These are the ALA itself and its eleven divisions. Three of these divisions hold particular interest to library teachers: the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), and the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). Beyond these major divisions, there are within the ALA and within each division many committees addressing many areas of interest. So there is ample opportunity for librarians to get involved. AASL, for example, currently has 31 committees (an AASL reorganization is in process so the names and the number of committees are expected to change). The current committees are listed at http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aboutaasl/aaslgovernance/aaslcommittees/committees.htm. Although most of these committees are specific to AASL, there are two interdivisional committees: The AASL and ALSC Interdivisional Committee on Information Literacy; and the AASL, ALSC and YALSA Interdivisional Committee on School/Public Library Cooperation.

 My major interests at Midwinter this year were legislation and the Emerging Leaders Program. The ALA Washington Office (WO) provided briefings on the political climate in Congress, the legislative topics that concern libraries, and the position of the ALA on various legislative matters. For one thing, “Reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a stated priority for the 110^th congress.” (WO Update on Issues for the 110^th Congress) The ALA seeks to have library teachers included in NCLB similarly to the way classroom teachers are included. “To be a critical part of a comprehensive and renewed strategy to ensure that students learn to read (and to read well), every school library should be staffed by a highly qualified, state certified library media specialist and every school should have a school library.” (ALA-WO 2007 Midwinter Meeting, “A ‘Highly Qualified’ Librarian in Every School Library”)

As for the Emerging Leaders Program, we met for a full day and covered such things as the essentials of leadership in ALA and the process for working on the projects that are part of our program. Each division of ALA, I believe, had the opportunity to design projects for the Emerging Leaders. I requested and received assignment to Team E. Our project, proposed by the AASL, is “Outreach to NCATE programs as a sustainable component of our [AASL’s] student member cultivation-strategies that mirror the intensity of our attention to ALA-MLS programs.” At Midwinter we began planning our approach to this project. Anyone interested in learning more about the Emerging Leaders Project is welcome to visit our blog at http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6411612.html or our wiki at http://wikis.ala.org/emergingleaders/index.php/Main_Page. My team will post reports on the wiki at http://wikis.ala.org/emergingleaders/index.php/Project_E.
 

The sessions at Midwinter that dealt with librarianship, as distinct from running the ALA or working with Congress, included a discussion about the acquisition of series titles now that the Library of Congress no longer provides series authority records; and a session where librarians shared “their personal experiences on gathering, using and analyzing usage [of e-resources] data in their libraries.” (Midwinter Meeting “Official Calendar of Events”) Anyone interested can view the full calendar of Midwinter events online at http://wikis.ala.org/midwinter2007/index.php/Official_Calendar_of_Events but should do this soon, before ALA removes it from the website.