Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Hey, We're Still Alive Over Here!

It's been a while since I've posted here. I've been busy with two library jobs, trying to get the next issue of the zine ready, and preparing for the World Fantasy Convention that this hasn't been my top priority. There's been a lot of stuff going on that I have thoughts on. Of course, at this point the time has passed for me to make relevant posts about it (the whole librarian as a calling thing is dead in the water now...), but today I read something from one of my favorite blogs, The Annoyed Librarian, that has prompted me to write.

Now, the AL (as she calls herself) tends to annoy/anger me as I read her posts, but I think I need that. Just like how Library Revolution makes me mad some times, the AL writes some things that get my hackles up. She calls things as they are. And I think librarians need someone to stand up and call their bullshit "bullshit" now and again. (I don't believe she'd curse, that's my own failing)

From today (she's discussing outsourcing library services):
This debate is similar to all the guff about how we have to bend over and grab our ankles to make libraries "relevant" to people. Libraries are relevant or they're not. The people care, or they don't. If people don't want what libraries provide, then libraries will go away, but that's more of a problem for the librarians than it is for the people. What if all "information" was available for free online, search engines had perfected search, "information literacy" was universal, and computers and Internet access were available to all? If that happens, public libraries will probably be unnecessary for the most part. Is that a problem for the people, or for the librarians? Even now it's true for many people. Access to information is cheap. We talk about the "digital divide," but I wonder how many people on the other side of the digital divide can afford televisions and cable.
and:
If librarians were interested only in user satisfaction, they wouldn't complain about library outsourcing in such a knee-jerk manner. Librarians are interested in librarians, except, of course, when they're not.
I mean, how great is that? But I want you to go back and think about this statement again:
Libraries are relevant or they're not.
Yes, there are things you can do to make the library more prominent in the community, there are things you can do to enhance the user experience (my library now has downloadable movies, sweet!), but there's little you can do to make the library more relevant.

There's only so much control you have over what someone else thinks is relevant. At one point in my life guitars and music shops were the only relevant thing. At another point it was skateboarding. I think most people who know me now would laugh a little to hear those two statements. More pertinent to this discussion, even though I work in a library now, and would feel comfortable to say that librarianship is a calling for me, from when I left high school to when I started my MLIS coursework (a span of 1989 - 2004) I entered a library fewer than ten times. The library was not relevant to me.

These days, I could not live without the library. If for nothing more than the fact that I no longer buy hundreds of books a year. And again, for that alone I love being part of a big consortium. There are few books that I am looking for that I cannot get through the consortium. I am not able to use much of the library's programming. This is equal parts my lack of time and the lack of convenience of getting to the library. But is the library relevant to me? As an employee, of course. As a patron...I don't know. If I wasn't in the library a few times a month (I'm part-time at the public gig) I don't know how much I'd use it. Certainly not the branch I work at; there are two closer to me.

I do think that libraries should do a better job of marketing their services to their community. And perhaps they need to hire someone to do that for them. I'm not convinced that librarians know what their community wants, or where their community goes/is, to be able to market properly. Will better marketing make libraries relevant? That's up to the patron. Not to us.

Friday, October 05, 2007

ALA Website Broken?

UPDATE: Working now, at 10:50 AM CST. Weird.

As of 10:30 AM CST, I get this message when I click on the Events & Conferences link in the main navigation bar at ALA:

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL:
http://www.ala.org/error/HTTP_FORBIDDEN.cfm
The following error was encountered:
Read Error
The system returned: (104) Connection reset by peer
An error condition occurred while reading data from the network. Please retry your request.
Your cache administrator is
webmaster.
When I try to click on the Midwinter icon that's on the right-hand side of the site I get this:

The page you requested is not on our new Web site at this Web address: /errordocs/300.cfm. The American Library Association has redesigned and reorganized its Web site. Try these steps to find this resource:
Search our site.The resource you are looking for may have a new URL (Web address).

If you are unable to find a specific piece of content, please contact
library@ala.org for assistance. We will get back to you within one week. Alternately, you can browse the site archive at http://archive.ala.org/, which includes the entirety of the site as it existed prior to April of 2003. Please note that content in our archive may be outdated or functioning incorrectly.
Thank you for visiting ALA's new Web site!
So, anyone else having this problem? I've e-mailed ALA, but since I've never done that before, I don't have any idea how responsive they are.

Am I the only one having trouble? I'm using IE7 to view the page. I've deleted the cache on this machine (I'm on a chared computer at the reference desk; I've never gone to ALA from this machine before today) to try and see if there was something stored in memory, burt that hasn't fixed anything.