ALA, Sustain Thyself

I’m putting my scold hat back on because I look so good in it.  But I’ll try to keep it brief.

Look: Las Vegas is an unsustainable city.  So why is the American Library Association hosting its annual conference there as we speak?

http://bit.ly/1yZY38i

ALA supports environmental sustainability, as evidenced by the recent establishment of Sustainability Round Table.  Its charge is to move the profession forward “toward a more equitable, healthy and economically viable society;” its mission is “is to provide resources for the library community to support sustainability through curriculum development; collections; exhibits; events; advocacy, communication, library buildings and space design..”

I can’t think of a bigger library “event” than the ALA annual conference, and yet I can’t imagine a worse venue for it, from a sustainability perspective, than Las Vegas.  Water scarcity, air quality, urban sprawl and energy use are all major issues in Las Vegas--issues that are fed by tourist interest, and exacerbated by desires for quick fixes for human comfort, rather than systemic improvements.  (Don’t take my word for it--here’s a presentation given by a British schoolteacher.  You can trust anything delivered in a British accent, even when it’s only in writing.)

To be fair, the city is trying.  This article highlights the environmental problems facing Vegas as well as the efforts that the mega-business owners of the Strip are making to ameliorate matters.  Such efforts are admirable, but nothing will change the fact that living in and visiting places like Las Vegas and Phoenix just perpetuates the problems that such initiatives are scrambling to fix.  And no subterranean stream is going to help the mess that is the Colorado River, whose decline is helped along by Sin City’s demands for water.  The fact is that humans weren’t meant to live in deserts, much less vacation there in luxury.

http://bit.ly/1m0mCfo

And yet ALA chose to bring its conference, and the dollars of thousands of librarians, to this energy-sucking, man-made desert oasis whose bright lights can be seen from space.

With a world full of options, why do we choose to support one that is so in conflict with an important contemporary value?  

And much of what I’ve seen on social media from my colleagues is excitement.  I’ll admit it, when I first heard ALA ‘14 would be held in Vegas, I was excited too.  That was before it sunk in what it meant.  Let’s get serious: this is a city composed of knock-offs, built as a shrine to the act of gambling.  It’s a playground.  Any true beauty and culture developed as an afterthought.  When I considered what it costs to power, cool, transport, and light the place--and I’m not just talking dollars--I decided that there was nothing to get excited about.

All for the sake of a playground.

I’d like to be able to say that I’m sitting on my couch at home in Western New York right now because I decided to be principled and boycott ALA.  Alas, I didn’t have the money to go anyway, rendering any such intent to boycott meaningless.  Nor did I get my thoughts together in time to make a plea for other librarians to consider foregoing this year’s conference.  I’m not being a very effective activist right now, am I?  But that doesn’t detract from the importance of stating my view, and hoping that there are others out there who agree with me.  Maybe we can mobilize to make our feelings known, and prevent ALA from making a return to the heart of unsustainability.

What’s the endgame, if I get my way?  Well, if ALA made it a part of their platform not to patronize such cities, maybe the organizations that look to us and respect our values will make similar moves.  That could end up rippling out, as libraries effect publishers, who effect distributors, who effect and effect and effect...

Which leaves the question of how to get ALA to listen.  Boycotting is one way, and the great thing is that we can still get the benefit of programs and sessions without being there in person.  Lots of them are accessible asynchronously, and their materials are available for the asking.  Maybe not every little thing can be found without paying for some kind of attendance, but librarians aren’t really known for limiting access (especially when they’re presenters excited about their topic of interest).

A formal petition to ALA could also have an effect.  I’m going to look into starting one through one of the grassroots activism groups out there.  If you agree with parts of what I’m saying, watch out for that; I’d appreciate your support.

Finally, all those of us who care about the environment, and want to bring librarianship to a leading role in its defense, should join the Sustainability Round Table.  It’s ten bucks to join, which I don’t mind paying at all.  The point of this isn’t to punish ALA, after all, but to get its attention.  What better way than to see a flow of money going into the round table, rather than toward registration for the next unsustainable conference?

In the parlance of Sin City, I’m putting my money on green.

http://bit.ly/1x0Y2in

It's a Point of Contact: The Importance of ALA Annual

Looking forward to ALA, I thought I would have a ton to say about it on my blog.  And I do--I just don’t want to provide a pointless rehash of the sessions I attended and vague descriptions of the people I met.  I have to keep my audience in mind--a habit I am striving for--and that means providing entertaining relevance.  And maybe a little ranting.  

 

I suppose that general impressions of such a major event  are not to be despised, since I’m a first time attendee and a major conference is always quite the bouleversement.  But I don’t want eyes to glaze at this, of all times.  Because if there was ever a time for you to be excited about the fact that I’m a librarian, it’s now.

ALA taught me that I’m going to take my MLS and smash everything.  Based solely on the sessions that I attended, I am going to integrate immigrants into my community, rescue homeless LGBTQ teens, turn 20-somethings’ library ‘mehs’ into ‘MMMMs!’, and transmit the love of truth and justice down through the generations in delicious four-color funnybook format.  I’m going to schmooze charmingly, make great professional friends, speak French as if I’ve been doing it every day, and stare Cory Doctorow right in the mean mean FACE every freaking day!

I sound like I’m joking.  I’m not.  As far as ALA would have me believe, I am capable of all these things.  ALA took one set of PLA jumper cables, set me in a puddle of LGBT Roundtable, and turned on the overly-loud-and-earnest Brandon Sanderson juice.  And I met Gene Luen Yang!  ALA completed my life.

I know this euphoria will wear off, but I think that periodic jolts of this energy will keep me flying through my career.  I want to live up to the expectation those librarians, newbie and veteran, up on the stages and panels lit in me.  It doesn’t even look that hard to BE them!  I can do that!  I can talk for 15 minutes about Librarians LOUD!  I can!

Look, I had an amazing time.  I need to thank my three great library-buddies, Esther Jackson, Natalie Bennett and Bryan Sajecki.  I wouldn’t have even been able to go if they hadn’t invited me to tag along with them.  The car ride was hilarious.  Our shared hostel room was chill.  Wandering around Lincoln Park was lovely.  And knowing, even when we split up to go to the various sessions that interested each of us, that we’d be reuniting in a few hours to chatter about what we learned and who we saw and how dumb some things were and what we wanted for dinner...well, that took the whole thing beyond level of ‘professional development.’  Thank you for sharing it all with me.

I also really have to say that it’s not as overwhelming as everyone makes it out to be, this big conference.  Maybe it’s just me and my experience with comic-cons and weekends at Times Square, but the people-crush stress actually struck me as rather mild--moderate at most.  If I can offer any tips to feel merely whelmed: familiarize yourself with the layout of the venue; be aware of where you’re going and when you have to be there; and remain flexible to avoid stress if things don’t work out as you planned.  Sometimes it’s good to deviate from the schedule if opportunities to network or schmooze come up.

In fact, I only got stressed out on the occasions when I was forced to deviate from my schedule against my will due to transit issues, and this brings me to my major gripe with ALA as an organization: they seem not to have given any serious consideration to the needs of lower-income attendees such as little old moi.  My main evidence is the utter lack of transit support for anyone who might have chosen to stay outside of the handful of high-priced hotels ALA recommended for our use.  My friends and I chose to trade off proximity for the economic benefit of staying in an affordable hostel in the Lincoln Park area, only to find it very difficult to navigate to the conference on the first morning we tried; even after we had it all figured out, the trip took about an hour, and we were spending significant amounts of mental energy trying to piece together alternate routes that might cut the commute down.  

Look, I know you can’t provide every attendee with curbside limo service at a thing like this.  But some nod in our general direction would have been appreciated--like a warning among the first-timer material that the commute from outside the immediate city core will take an inordinate amount of time, or an insert among the other transportation materials about the closure of a key metro station along the way.  (That would have saved us one mega venue-overshoot, but to be fair, I guess, the city of Chicago didn’t do a great job making that clear either.)  And would it be that onerous an undertaking to poll prospective attendees on their intended accommodations and say, “Gee, if these guys are choosing to stay somewhere that cheap, maybe we should spare them a little time and money by providing a shuttle to that area”?  Perhaps more attendees would then choose to stay in the littler, cooler neighborhoods of a given city, better spreading the librarian love around our conference site.  (Every bartender and drunk bystander we informed of our profession was endlessly fascinated.  I quite enjoy the “You need a master’s degree for that?!” conversation.)

It wasn’t so bad, in the end, and I love public transit, but I’m just kind of offended that our economic bracket was so low on the list of concerns.

If at all possible, go with friends.  Look up buddies from your LIS program if you’re not particularly close to current co-workers.  Yeah, it helps keep costs down, but that’s the smallest part of it.  My friends and I had such a wonderful time; we built in-jokes, proudly represented our field, fed off each other’s excitement from good sessions and relieved each other’s boredom from bad ones...I’ve already covered this territory, but it bore repeating.  Don’t go alone!

Now, besides recounting my trials and triumphs at this year’s conference, I would like to talk about the importance of ALA.  I’m very aware that what I’m about to write is pretty touchy-feely, maybe naive, and definitely pro-status quo.  There are lots of things wrong with ALA, and groups like ALA Think Tank on Facebook do a good job of articulating them and providing alternate voices, a chorus of which I hope to be a part; but I also happen to think that the annual conference is where the best of ALA comes out.

So...what is the best of ALA, its importance?  What does it reach beyond its bureaucracy and occasionally out-of-touch policies?  The excitement, the ideas, the sharing, the opportunities for expression. It’s a point of contact, where librarians of all shapes and sizes bump up against each other and where intellectual osmosis works its wonders.  It’s the availability of easily copycatted ideas, because when it comes to making our libraries work, there’s no such thing as plagiarism--or at least we’re all more willing to cite our sources than the average high school paper-writer.

It’s a point of contact, again.  The engaging that members of our profession do with another city each year, making a positive impression on a population--the engaging of the profession as a body with a city as a being.  Actually I would like to see this done more self-consciously in future.  Let’s paint Las Vegas librarian.  I don’t want a single gambler to be unaware of what’s going on around their slot machines next June.

Jiff--the world's most photogenic dog!

It’s a point of contact, for small photogenic dogs and brash cynical hipster chicks and a forlorn representative of the National Library of Qatar and a transitioning MTF teen and blue-collar Muzzy executives and a self-published Beowulf comic creator and OA aficionados and Snowden apologists and an interactive robot and and and and and...

ALA, I hope to join you in painting Las Vegas librarian next year.

Lincoln Park, you've been painted librarian.

Over-involved

It's just about a week until that holiest of weekends, the American Library Association Annual Conference.  This year it will be held in Chicago, Illinois (for fun and profit) and, as I believe I mentioned in my inaugural post, I'll be attending with three other freshly-hatched librarians from the UB LIS program!  We're all very excited, especially as this year's theme is Science-Fiction and Fantasy: The Factual and the Counterfactual.  Oh no, wait, it's Experimentation and Innovation in Libraries: What We Can Learn from Startups. No, that's not it! My mistake.  It's Introduction to RDA and Ontologies for the Semantic Web.

Not really.  In fact, the conference doesn't actually have a theme; the three that I listed above are merely the names of three of the many programs happening across the four days librarians take over the Windy City.  The many, many programs.  I mean, unless the tagline on the ALA Annual website--"Transforming our libraries, ourselves"--is meant to be a theme, in which case it's so general as to be not really very useful, and, based on my very thorough survey of all those programs, not particularly binding of presenters' focus--which, we can all agree, rather defeats the purpose of having a theme at all.

Now, I don't really mind this, myself.  We have a varied field and we all approach our corners of it in our own way.  I would rather give all my librarian buddies full range in which to develop presentations and poster sessions and so forth than force them all into any particular thematic cubbyhole for the year, however expansive a cubbyhole it may be. (And, again, expansiveness of theme has a certain limit beyond which it starts to get self-defeating.)

But I did run across a peer voicing concern with this tendency toward sprawl on a social network group the other day.  He worries that the breadth of offerings at ALA Annual bespeak a certain lack of coherence and discipline on the part of our profession.  And despite my above approbation, I think he has a point.

You can't take my approval of sprawl as evidence that everything is dandy--I am, after all, lacking in coherence and discipline myself.  My ALA schedule runs the gamut from graphic novels to Deaf culture to LGBTQ support to late-night programming and LITERALLY EVERYTHING in between.  If I could tame my own incoherence I might be happier, but I would almost certainly have less fun.

So is that it--is our profession undisciplined?  Are we less of a single body than, say, dentists?  (A dangerous force, dentists.)  Are we the professional equivalent of the over-involved college student, desperate for a snatch of everything campus life has to offer--drama club, newspaper, debate team, track and field--taking part in a little bit of everything but excelling at nothing? When the Meta-Librarian gets together with the Ur-Dentist and the Quintessential CPA and all the other Professionals Up In The Sky, are we the guy whose face everybody knows but whose name they can't place?  Is that the source of our under-appreciation and our embattlement in society at large?

We are very good at some specialized things, and I would never give up our engagement in the cultural, intellectual, and academic lives of our patrons.  And I still believe that's a good thing.  But is it possible there is a better thing? A leaner, meaner librarian? Slam, bam, reference interview, thank you, ma'am?

I think it bears some questioning.  As long as we keep all the extra-curriculars I'm interested in; I'll work on my self-discipline later.  Meanwhile, I think my dentist would REALLY like to hear about my Deaf LGBTQ overnight treasure hunt program idea.

UPDATE: "Transforming our libraries, ourselves" is, in fact, the conference theme.  I guess that's cool!