Blatant Berry: Democracy in ALA

Too low a priority on the association agenda

By John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large jberry@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 12/15/2006

We once took a measure of pride in our victories in the battle to make the governance of the American Library Association (ALA) accessible, participatory, indeed democratic. Maintaining that participatory democracy in ALA seems to be a lower priority now.

I'm told it is tough to get candidates to run for the organization's president and treasurer and even tougher to get candidates for ALA Council. Membership meetings, once an important barometer of member interest in participation, still have difficulty attracting a tiny quorum of 75 people.

A relatively small percentage of the total eligible members vote in ALA elections, even with the addition of email balloting, one of ALA's few concessions to the democratizing potential of the electronic universe. Efforts to use the amazing powers of new technologies and the Internet to allow for remote action, true distance democracy if you like, have been resisted, and the tremendous opportunity there is still largely untapped.

In truth, for the most part ALA and its divisions are run by well-heeled administrators, elites whose participation is subsidized by their institutions. Those institutions, alas, support and/or give time off to only a very small portion of their staff to allow them to attend ALA conferences. The expenses of ALA's top officers to attend meetings are paid by the organization, as they should be. Councilors must pay their own way, however. That is a considerable barrier for librarians and staff in the field's lower ranks.

I've been a member of many divisions for decades and have rarely been asked to get involved or do anything other than pay to attend conferences and other events and vote for preselected slates for offices. For years, efforts to promote greater member engagement have rarely succeeded.

More than once, movements toward the direct election of the ALA Executive Board by members rather than by the elitist Council have failed.

Members have little or no role in selecting ALA's endowment trustees, yet how we invest our endowment money is a burning issue with many of them, whose protests have brought very slight movement toward socially responsible investing.

The relatively new Allied Professional Association (APA) of ALA is a classic example of how ALA inadvertently prevents direct activity by members. For reasons I have never been able to figure out despite discussions with high-level ALA officials and many of its presidents, APA has no members. It is governed by the very same Council that ALA members elect to govern ALA. APA was created so ALA could take action on behalf of its members without damaging its tax-exempt status. Yet those same members have no role to play in its governance; talk about patronizing. APA is the one unit of the organization designed to deal with member interests in such fundamental matters as salaries and continuing education for credentials. The Council lavishes as much as two or three hours a year on APA, a level of neglect that signifies how unimportant member issues are to Council.

Teaching a bit of library history at the School of Library and Information Sciences at the Pratt Institute this fall took me back to the difficult battles to force ALA to open committee and unit meetings so members could observe them. I remember when members acted to overturn onerous actions of ALA Council and their fight to allow membership initiatives easy access to the Council agenda and membership ballot if necessary. Now those devices are rarely used, and ALA conferences are largely devoted to program sessions and schmoozing and boozing. [For the Midwinter preview, see p. 76.]

I remember most our pride in the receptiveness of association leaders to our actions and the resulting democratization of ALA. Members took a small portion of what was called “power” in ALA in those days.

Now it's time to renew those efforts to preserve and expand participatory democracy in ALA. It worked once, and it can work again.