I saw this over on my friend Anna’s blog and thought it was pretty neat, so here’s mine!

I can’t believe it’s here (and I’m tired already, just thinking about it!), but ALA 2011 starts on Friday!  I’ll be heading out Friday morning, with a mid-afternoon arrival in New Orleans.   As usual, my calendar is entirely impossible! Send me a message if you’d like to meet up.  I’ll hopefully be tweeting and such a bit more than usual while I’m at the conference.

And this year, I resolve to actually post a conference wrap-up instead of just thinking a lot about posting one

I'm Attending ALA 2011

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading to Austin for the excellent Electronic Resources & Libraries conference.  It’s one of my favorite conferences because it’s small and friendly and eminently useful to my day to day job.  I enjoy ALA Annual, mostly because I get to see people I rarely ever see in person and because I get to talk about and hear about some of the larger issues facing libraries.  Electronic Resources & Libraries, though, is focused in a way that I haven’t seen in any other conference.  Nearly everything is useful, and there are lots of wonderful conversations that happen with other librarians and vendors.

If you’d like to see my schedule, it should be embedded below.  If not, here’s the PDF version.

ER&L 2011 Schedule

I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project again this year!  Started in 2008, the Library Day in the Life has really taken off…It’s grown from a single day snapshot of what librarians are doing all day to a week long look.  Librarians from all over the world have participated, and from all variations on the librarian job.  It’s a fascinating project, and I’m happy to participate.  I’ll probably be posting at least twice this week, because this week actually includes our state’s “Library Legislative Day”, so I’d like to talk about that this week as well.

For my past “Day in the Life” posts, you can check out my “Day in the Life” category.

I’ve made a variety of New Year’s resolutions in my life….some of them successful (taking better care of my mental health) and some not very (see various failed exercising attempts).   The most successful “resolutions” I made weren’t even New Year’s resolutions, but goals I set for myself.  Since it’s that time of year, I thought I’d take a look and see how things were going.

In March of 2006, I set the following goals:

1. Figure out Library 2.0
2. Get involved in local and maybe national associations
3. Find out about the Alumni Board
4. Learn about web/electronic services librarian positions

Results:

1. Well, I’m not sure anyone can really “figure out Library 2.0″, but I’d say I’ve done about as well as most of the librarians I know.  I’ve helped quite a few librarians around the state figure out this “Web 2.0″ thing as well.
2. I’d say I’ve pretty much blown this one out of the water…I’ve been incredibly active in several state library associations, and I’ve been pretty involved in NMRT (ALA) stuff as well.  I’ve learned that I enjoy the state level stuff much more than the national level, so I’ll be focusing more on that for a while.  I’m not dropping my ALA membership, but I’ll be exploring more options there to find a better fit for me.
3. Since these goals were the result of an Alumni Day at my library school, this made sense at the time.  I’ve since learned some things about the Alumni Board that have made me change my mind.  I also haven’t really had time to pursue this, since #2 went so well.
4. Again, hit this one out of the park.  I’m now an Electronic Resources librarian.  Is it all I thought it would be?  Maybe not, but it’s where I am, and I’ve made the decision to stay here for a few years longer.  I’ve enjoyed it, and it’s certainly been a challenge (and still is).  I’m just not sure it’s where I want to be forever.

It’s now been over four years since I set those goals.  I’d say it’s time for some new ones!

1. Get a second master’s in instructional technology or non-profit leadership.
2. Find a better fit for me in ALA, if there is one.
3. Continue to be active in statewide library activities.
4. Find more opportunities to teach or train.

I’m not going to say that I’ll be a better, more consistent blogger in the new year.  That’s just not me.  At least not right now.  It’s just not the most comfortable way for me to interact online.  I much prefer FriendFeed (and Twitter), so if you’d like to hang out virtually, you can find me there.

So the latest hubbub over in the LSW FriendFeed room is all about database vendors and how libraries (and librarians) respond to them…Steve Lawson has written about it on his blog, See Also…, and received some FriendFeed comments as well.  (All of which started with Meredith Farkas and Sarah Houghton-Jan aka Librarian in Black)

This issue – how vendors treat their library customers, and what libraries & librarians should do about it – is one I’ve seen several times in the recent past.  Attending the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference this year, there was a lot of discussion about the costs of individual journals and how they’ve continued to skyrocket.  And what can we do about it?  And what about databases?  The prices for those keep rising and vendors keep making exclusive deals that mean that if we want to keep the same content we’ve had we have to pay more for more databases.  Which, at least for my library, puts us over a barrel.  We can’t afford to just add a new subscription every time the database vendors decide to change or remove content.  This is why my library doesn’t have a subscription to the newspaper of record in our town.  We can’t afford the price for the exclusive content.  We do receive it on microfilm, and can use the newspaper’s search function on their website, but that only goes back about 10 years.

So what *can* we do about it?  In the FriendFeed discussions, there’s been suggestions of voting with our feet – don’t use the vendors that do this sort of thing.  Okay.  But will the vendors notice?  There’s also been suggestions of getting the major consortias involved.  Have the member libraries let the consortias know that they’re not happy with certain vendors and would not like to deal with them.  This could make a dent.  As could the suggestions of creating some kind of list of unacceptable license clauses (I’d love to see this, personally, and think that it fits in with the other licensing standardization projects that are happening).

One other suggestion is to tell the patrons – the true database customers – why they can’t access the things they want and have them complain to the vendors.  I’m not sure that would work so well, as I’m not sure that enough patrons would actually complain.  I can imagine that academic libraries could get faculty to complain, but I’m not sure public libraries would have the same luck.

All of these issues – e-resource costs, vendor attitudes, etc. – are wrapped up in a larger issue, in my thinking.  The entire publishing industry, at least for academic publishing, is either broken or breaking.  It’s been this way for a long time, but it seems that more and more people are starting to realize it.  Not including the vendors themselves, who seem to want to hold on to the old way of doing things as long as they can, much like the RIAA and movie industry have.  It hasn’t worked so well for them.  We’ll see if it will work for the academic publishing industry.  There are some major changes that have to happen in faculty tenure and promotion before there can be too many other changes in academic publishing.  The real question is – who’s going to change first?

I’m in the process of winnowing and combining my various online presences into something more manageable.  Hopefully, this space will be my blog and online portfolio in the coming days.