ALA Program Picks & Pans

Facing a tumult of transition, the members, staff, and fellow travelers of the American Library Association (ALA) will converge on steamy Atlanta this month for their Annual Conference. They will tackle an agenda that will bring fundamental change to ALA, and will continue to grapple with the difficult process of redefining libraries for the digital information age ahead. ALA conference-goers will also engage in their annual summer rituals of installing new officers, pursuing new knowledge, viewing and evaluating new content and hardware, and, of course, partying all night.

Newly appointed ALA Executive Director (ED) Keith Fiels, a youthful fiftysomething, will enter the fray in Atlanta. Fiels comes to ALA from a long term as director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, one of the politically challenged state library agencies. As a result he brings political skills and savvy that could only be learned in Boston. Those skills include basic training in how to move an agenda through dense, entrenched bureaucracy; how to survive intense, highly partisan politics; and how to transverse the battlefield between warring parties without being wounded in the crossfire. He will need all of these talents and more at 50 East Huron Street-ALA HQ-but the honeymoon should last through his venture in Atlanta.

Fiels replaces the personable Bill Gordon, who spent a lot of his tenure out in the chapters and affiliates of ALA building constituencies and strong bonds. Gordon let the ALA staff grow in autonomy, and depended heavily on the competent and effective managerial talents of his second in command, Mary Ghikas, to maintain quality staff work and to keep things under control in Chicago. Ghikas could be Fiels best asset and ally for the work ahead.

A new Allied Professional Association (APA) is being formed at this gathering but will hereafter exist as an ALA affiliate. This effort is designed, for the most part, to get around limitations on direct support of members imposed by Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code on organizations like ALA. The need was partly to have a body with a more liberal tax status so it could respond to member demands for ALA action on the dismal salaries of librarians. The new APA also could opt to license ALA units, library schools, and others to sell certificates proving librarians and other library workers had updated their skills through continuing education programs. It could also lobby more actively. The devil for ALA officers will be in the details of how the APA will be governed and how it will interface with ALA. These matters will be debated in Atlanta.

There is also the highly controversial question of who should accredit graduate programs of library and information studies. One camp wants a new accrediting body created outside ALA, to get other organizations with library and information technology interests involved in accreditation. The other camp wants ALA to continue to do it. One side sees an opportunity for ALA to accredit all kinds of degrees in all fields dealing with information and technology. The other sees the proposal as a total abandonment of ALA's main purpose in accreditation-to ensure the graduation of people able to competently serve in libraries. Obviously, the results of this debate will have dramatic impact on both library education and on the ability of libraries to recruit and hire.

All of this debate mirrors the larger library agenda reflected in the conference programs. The field is having great difficulty recruiting and retaining people to replace the huge number of librarians about to retire. The desperate techies from the collapsed dot.com world, having failed to find nirvana in the commercial exploitation of the Internet, are now on the street. Many of them hungrily eye the traditional turf of academic, public, school, and special libraries as potential laboratories for their alchemy.

Librarians, always ready to panic over their societal status, now prepare to gird their loins to protect their institutions and jobs from this techie assault. They, in turn, offer a host of programs on the unique role and indispensability of the librarian in bringing any services, digital, print, or otherwise, to library users.

The ALA program also includes such traditional topics as managing, marketing, and hiring people, and both old and new services for users. Mixed with those are a host of sessions showing how some librarians have carved out roles or turf in such new areas as electronic 24/7 reference service, paperless and peopleless libraries and systems, and remote digital services of all kinds.

Digital developers have invaded the ALA program from the massive exhibit hall, much as they are invading libraries. They offer, as they have for years, to give you electronic systems to handle circulation, reference, acquisitions, collection development, interlibrary cooperation, resource sharing, library education, and, of course, all sorts of marketing and management. Much of the ALA program deals with specific attempts to apply technology to library problems and services. Programs of very useful specificity deal with all kinds of ways to apply information technology to the library.

On the other hand, strong sessions deal with the larger question of what the role of the institution and concept of 'library' will be in the community, on campus, or in the corporation once digital, interactive access to information is nearly universal. You will find a wealth of programs on the library's new position and the new job of the librarian in that digital brave new world.

Surveyed in all its grandeur, the ALA program can provide flexible conference goers with the ideas and tools to position the library and those who work there for the near future, as they plan for a longer term.

The whole is arranged in a complicated and nearly impenetrable web of tracks and subtracks too difficult to navigate. The preview below is one attempt to help you navigate that web, with signals along the way. The stars (* ) mean the program has a good chance to inform, entertain, and be useful to you. The annotations give you our take on some of the topics and speakers. We have even included an occasional 'pitch alert' to warn you when a program may turn out to be more of a sales call than a continuing education session, although as librarians in the tradition of old Melvil Dewey, we know the two are not always mutually exclusive.