American Libraries

ALA Presidential Candidate Kenton Oliver responds to Tom Peters's question on how ALA can enable participation without travel. More ALA videos at alfocus.ala.org.

Question:
Tom Peters: Hi, ALA presidential candidates. Tom Peters here, coming to you from the eastern slope of Monkey Mountain, Missouri, nestled between Oak Grove and Grain Valley – it’s really just a hill, not a mountain. I hope you’re having a great time in the Mile High City. In case you’re wondering, I’m currently 263 meters above sea level, maybe 264 if you factor in the height of this chair.

Here’s the lead into my question: tens of thousands of ALA members cannot attend Midwinter and Annual Conference and divisional national conferences. Maybe they work in a one-person or small library, or their travel budget is strapped, or they have family commitments, or they want to reduce their carbon footprint.

ALA has made some steps towards making it easier for us infrequent flyers to network, to learn new ideas and skills and to participate meaningfully in the splendiferous work of this association. ALA has begun using its quiver of 2.0 tools: blogs; wikis; web conferencing software; Second Life; and YouTube to make it possible for its members to participate and contribute from far flung locations. But, honestly, we’re still just scratching the surface.

As ALA president, what would you do to make it easier for all ALA members to both add to and gain value from our association without having to travel and attend events in person? Thanks much. Stay warm.

Response Transcript:
Kent Oliver: My name is Kent Oliver. And I’m a candidate for ALA president this year. And I’m here to respond to Tom Peters’ YouTube question for the candidates. Tom’s from Oak Grove and Grain Valley in Missouri, which is an area I know very well, having been a Missouri librarian and spent much of my life in Kansas City. He’s in the shadows of Arrowhead Stadium and Kauffman Stadium in the Kansas City area. Right now, I’m sitting in a distance learning lab at the Perry Sippo library in Canton, Ohio. And this is one of the Stark County District Library branch libraries. And the room I’m sitting in happens to be one of our distance learning labs.

Tom’s question – or his primary question – was: “What would you do to make it easier for all ALA members to add and gain from the association without having to travel to conferences?” That was his main question; and he had a few others embedded in there.

And I guess part of your statement or question, Tom, that I would debate a little bit, would be that ALA is just scratching the surface. I sense we’re doing pretty well, based upon most measures next to other associations of our types and sizes. We use Facebook; blogs; wikis; group discussion lists; ALA Connect; the division web sites; PLA communities; and even the ALA main website – as imperfect as it may be.

And I know that ALA staff are daily exploring new technologies and methods to communicate with the membership. And I saw this first hand while I was chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee. The staff in the Office for Intellectual Freedom were constantly trying new electronic methods to reach out to members so they could participate.

E-membership in committees has been around for several years. And having said that, the e-participation study, which rolled out at this year’s Midwinter, made it clear that we are in a transition. And the technology may be available now to where we can do more things than we could a few years ago because there are more options; and they seem like viable options. It is essential that the key parts of that study are gradually adopted, which allows ALA to build participation and also build its membership.

I would like to address a few other key points that were in parts of your video: I do believe that there is always a need for the old and new as we transition. And a great example of this is the media you have in your library at home – you still have DVDs and CDs, even though many people are downloading media from the Internet.

I also believe that there is always a cost to belonging to an organization. And I’ve always been amazed over the years to find how much personal capital my friends and colleagues will put into their membership in ALA – whether it be paying for the membership; paying for their travel to conference; or, for that matter, paying to run an ALA presidential campaign.

As we move forward with technology, I think we need to adapt the technologies that best meet our needs and best reach out to our membership – not just adapt things because they’re new or it’s cool to have technology. I strongly believe that there is a value in face-to-face meetings and conferences. And I’ll give you a great example of that: one of our computer people, who is twenty-something, recently attended a computers in libraries conference. And when he returned from that conference, one of the things he said was that he learned more in that meeting that happened in a few days’ time than he had the previous year by looking at blogs and wikis related to that topic.

In regard to your embedded thought about our carbon footprint, I hope we are all thinking about that as we go about our daily lives. Certainly ALA has made great strides over the last few years. They do a number of things while at conference to insure that we are considering the environment. And we have two publications that I think are great examples of what’s going on with our environment and our attempt as an association to respect it. The ALA Handbook of Organization is very hard to find in printed copy anymore; all the information is online, on our website. And it wasn’t that many years ago that thousands of those handbooks were printed. The Intellectual Freedom Manual that is printed by the Office of Intellectual Freedom happens to be the largest selling book that ALA publications puts out; and it is key and critical to our financial viability and the association.

One of the concerns and issues we will need to address in the future is that as we move to e-participation and making things available more in an electronic format and we respect the environment, that we figure out how to replace the revenue we will lose from selling those publications.

Having said all that, I think you do need to know that, as ALA president, it will be my goal to see e-participation implemented in a gradual way that makes sense for most of our members. I think a logical follow through on that is that we will see changes occur to our conferences and our reasons and needs to attend conferences. But I think we will see that play out as time goes on in a logical manner; and we will make sure that the way we do it is really right for our membership. Thank you.