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From John N. Berry III, Why I Stick with ALA:

“Most important, ALA provided an open structure in which members could organize units to advocate for the information rights of women; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals; the incarcerated; the poor and homeless; indeed every citizen. That structure allowed activist members to force the old association to be more democratic a few decades ago.”

Whatever your thoughts on the structure/bureaucracy of ALA, Berry has this part right: it provides an open door for new, underrepresented, and/or marginalized groups to have a place and a voice.

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Tomorrow I’ll be heading off to Indianapolis for ACRL 2013! Here is my tentative schedule which is, as always, subject to change. There are still a few gaps but I’ll figure those out later (need to leave some time for serendipitous discovery, right?)

I’d like to especially invite everyone to Battledecks on Wednesday night at 8pm. If you’ve never attended a Battledecks, you’re in for a delightful evening of laughs. Hope to see you there!

 

Tuesday

Arrive late afternoon

 

Wednesday

4:00-5:45: Opening Keynote, Geoffrey Canada (JW, Grand Ballroom 1-6)
7:00-7:30: ACRL 101 (ICC 104-106)
7:30-9:00: Battledecks (ICC 109-110)
9:00-11:00: ACRL TT Meetup (Slippery Noodle)

 

Thursday

8:00-9:00: Building a Dream Team: Library Personas in the 21st Century Library (ICC 107-108)
10:30-11:30: Invited Paper, Alison Head (ICC Wabash 2-3)
1:00-2:00: Hacking the Learner Experience: techniques and strategies w/ instructional ecosystem (ICC Wabash 2-3)
3:00-4:00: From the Periphery into the Mainstream: Library DIY culture(s) and the academy (JW Grand Ballroom 9-10)
4:20-6:00: Keynote, Henry Rollins (JW Grand Ballroom 1-6)
6:00-7:00: Libertine Meetup
7:00-8:30: Reception

 

Friday

8:30-11:30: THATCamp (ICC Wabash 1)
12:00-1:00: Virtual webcast presentation
1:30-5:00: THATCamp (ICC Wabash 1)
7:00-8:00: HackLibSchool meetup (Ram Restaurant and Brewery)
8:00-10:30: All-Conference Reception (Indiana State Museum)

 

Saturday

8:30-9:30: Think Like A Startup: creating a culture of innovation… (JW Grand Ballroom 9-10)

Leave for Los Angeles, early afternoon.

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Mia Breitkopf has a summary of Roy Tennant’s 2012 talk to the Academic Librarians Conference at Syracuse (yes, I’m late to this party but it’s still worth highlighting). Tennant (and R. David Lankes) emphasized the need for academic librarians to focus more on services, less on collections, and the need to be out in the community instead of behind a desk or in an office. What particularly caught my attention was “Tennant’s Ideas for Tugging Your Library Into the Future”:

  1. Outsource back-office work
  2. Get rid of the office
  3. Plan for continual change
  4. Reattach the library to the institution
  5. Dream up big ideas and try them
  6. Change collection development policies (i.e. reduce and move offsite)
  7. Have fun

Given what Tennant calls the “Four Horsemen of the Library Apocalypse” (unsustainable costs, viable alternatives, declining usage, and new patron demands), there isn’t much standing in the way of one bull-in-the-china-shop university administrator shutting the whole library system down in favor of an outsourcing option. In fact, as more universities adopt corporate world-inspired business models, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of it already.