Letters

Your editorial "A Vote for ALA Members " (LJ 3/15/03, p. 8) took a strong position on how the American Library Association (ALA) should manage its finances. The effort is appreciated, but the editorial contains some factual errors and misperceptions.

Libraries and librarians need a strong ALA now more than ever. That is why our governing bodies have voted to spend more than $1.5 million over the past two years to appeal the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). To do this, we had to exhaust the reserve the association had so carefully built up over many years—the excess spending referred to in the editorial. Why spend the money? CIPA threatens over $300 million a year in E-rate funding, as well as $150 million a year in Library Services and Technology Act funds. CIPA is a tremendous threat to our fundamental values—and to library funding.

In fact, the association reduced budgeted spending by five percent last year and is reducing budgeted spending by at least four percent this year. Everyone, including the officers, Executive Office, and board, has participated in the reductions.

On the plus side, the association's new Development Office has already helped generate approximately $10 million for ALA over the last three years. About six percent of this came from contributions by members, primarily toward Spectrum Scholarships and our struggle against CIPA. We should all be thankful to, not critical of, those members who made a personal sacrifice in order to help meet these critical challenges.

The Allied Professional Association also deserves our support. The APA is a historic opportunity to make a real difference in the struggle for better salaries for library workers. Thanks to the business plan developed last fall, the APA will be funded at a level that will enable it to bring substantial resources to bear on the slow, tough job of improving salaries where it counts—one library at a time. Without these funds our efforts to improve salaries would continue to rest on rhetoric alone.

It is easy to suggest that ALA reduce expenses. ALA is not a business, nor is fundraising an end in itself. What ALA members and staff work so hard to do is to leverage our hard-earned dues to support intellectual freedom, library legislation, literacy, diversity, recruitment, better salaries, and our other essential mutual goals. Last year alone, for every dollar members invested in the association through their dues, ALA generated $4 through conferences, publishing, fundraising, and other "business" efforts.

It's true, our goal is to generate the maximum resources possible—and to spend these resources at the right time, and in the right places, to achieve our mission and goals. To do otherwise would truly "short change" our members.
—Keith Michael Fiels, Executive Dir., American Lib. Assn., Chicago

Roy Tennant's "Library Catalogs: The Wrong Solution " (Digital Libraries, LJ 2/15/03, p. 28) accurately addresses many of the shortcomings of today's patron-facing library catalogs. It is these obstacles that have made the development of advanced portal technology such a hot topic in the integrated library system (ILS) industry. I agree wholeheartedly that libraries should be gateways to information beyond one particular catalog, which is why solutions like the Horizon Information Portal offer consolidated searching functionality that allows users to simultaneously search local databases, as well as the Internet and as many external databases as the library chooses.

To Tennant's point about the lack of enriched content, virtually every major ILS vendor gives libraries the option to add more than just bibliographic information to their catalogs. Detailed summaries, books jackets, reviews, and much more are available if libraries choose to offer such services to their patrons. If those services are not included, it's not because of a technological shortcoming in the ILS system but rather the result of an individual library's decision.

Finally, Tennant writes, "Most integrated library systems expect MARC records and MARC records only." Despite the fact that some vendors (including Dynix) do support a number of different cataloging systems, the reality is that MARC is the system that libraries know and trust. When libraries are ready to make the switch to a new model, the technology will not be what holds them back.

Tennant's article clearly reflects the frustrations many library patrons have experienced in the past, but the solution isn't for ILS systems to play a more limited role; the answer is for ILS systems to take a broader look at the pain points and build the technology to overcome them.
—Jack B. Blount, Pres. & CEO, Dynix, Provo, UT

Thanks for the great Inside Track (Francine Fialkoff, "Don't Blame the Reviewer ," LJ 4/15/03, p. 68). Crescent is easily one of the finest novels I've read in the past ten years, and I have no quarrels with the reviewer. (I met [Crescent author] Diana Abu-Jaber a couple of weeks ago at a book reading, so I have my own autographed copy as well as one I purchased for the library.) But really I'm thanking you for your defense of the reviewer. I've been reviewing for you since 1989.
—Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, OR