ALA Marginalia

American Libraries gets that question a fair amount—about five times a week. And with good reason: All ALA personal members are eligible to receive the newsletter, and yet, obviously, sometimes it doesn’t show up in their inbox.

The short answer to any readers who aren’t getting AL Direct is this: I don’t know—there are a lot of possibile reasons— but send an email to aldirect@ala.org letting us know that you’re not receiving the newsletter and George Eberhart or I will investigate.

For those craving detailed insight into anything that can go wrong in email publishing, read on.

Dirty Dozen

So far, we’ve found 12 reasons that AL Direct isn’t making it to your inbox.

1. An incorrect email address in iMis. That’s our membership database, from which we generate a new mailing list for AL Direct each week. A typo there will send the newsletter to the wrong place.
2. IMis doesn’t list you as a personal member. This may be because you genuinely aren’t a member—in which case, we’re flattered, and recommend you join the ALA to gain this and many other benefits of membership—or because your record isn’t showing your membership because it hasn’t been processed yet or some other error in the records.
3. Your ALA communication preferences block AL Direct. Members can set their communication preferences by logging into the ALA website and clicking the “review their communication preferences” link. Here, you can choose from four levels of communication. AL Direct is considered information from an ALA unit, so the “Just ALA, please” or “Official communications only” don’t include it.
4. The newsletter is being sent to your address, but it’s being redirected to a spam or junk mail folder, or being otherwised blocked.
5. The newsletter had a soft bounce, meaning that it reached your mail server successfully but not your specific address.
6. The newsletter had a hard bounce, meaning the address we’ve got is invalid, due to a bad domain, an unknown user, or a network problem.
7. Our mailing system is still working on getting the newsletter to you. When it registers a bounced newsletter, our system will continue trying to send the newsletter several more times over the next few days.
8. You’ve unsubscribed. This can happen inadvertantly with stray clicks. It’s also a hazard of forwarding the newsletter: if the person you forward it to clicks “unsubscribe”, your account will register the unsubscribe.
9. You’ve had enough previous hard bounces to be removed from our list. If an address bounces the newsletter several weeks in a row, our mailing service will assume that it’s a bad address and stop sending the newsletter there.
10. You’ve had enough previous soft bounces to be removed from our list. Same as above.
11. The address has been blacklisted. This is essentially the same as being unsubscribed, the main difference in practice being precisely how it happens rather than its effect.
12. There’s a problem with the query that generates our mailing list from iMis.

The good news is that any of these problems are usually fairly easy to solve, once diagnosed. So, if you’re not getting the newsletter, let us know (that address again: aldirect@ala.org) and we’ll sort it out.

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant

Does your organization only pay for conference if you have a committee assignment? Do you want to join the ranks of those saying mysteriously “I have a conflict”? How do you get started, anyway?

* Join up! First things first. You do need to be a member of ALA to be on an ALA committee (and of the division or round table where you’re seeking an appointment). So be sure your membership dues are current!

* Bone up! Take some time to learn about the Association. Dip into the ALA Handbook of Organization, either online or in paper. The 2007-2008 edition was just published, and it will be mailed to everyone listed in it. Or surf through the various pages currently found off the “Our Association” button on the ALA home page. Spend some time with the web pages from the division or round table that interest you to see what kinds of projects are underway.

If possible, talk with a current (or recent) member of the committee to get a sense of the type of work involved. Some committees do most of their work face-to-face at the conferences; others work extensively between conferences, using e-mail, online communities, wikis, etc.

* Listen up! If you can get to an Annual Conference or a Midwinter Meeting, sit in on a meeting of the committee that interests you. By policy, all meetings of ALA are open, unless there is a matter of personal privacy being discussed—which mostly means that juries/award selection committees or nominating committees are the exception and are closed to observers.

At the end of the meeting, introduce yourself to the chair of the committee. Offer to assist with a task proposed during the meeting. Leave your business card.

* Step up! Complete the volunteer form, either for ALA, or for your division or round table. Do this in addition to volunteering in person. Indicate specifically which committees interest you and why. And don’t be afraid to volunteer for a “process” committee—Organization and Bylaws, Budget, etc. These can provide an inside understanding of how ALA or your part of it works. OTOH, while you may be interested in the premier committee in your division, don’t expect to get an appointment for it right away. Most committees are limited in size, and if half the committee have appointments continuing to next year, and the other half is mostly being reappointed, there may only be one, maybe two, spaces for new members—and probably a long list of volunteers.

Some committees establish task forces or subcommittees chaired by a member of the committee, but staffed by volunteers who may not be. Working on a task force is a good way to get to know people and contribute your skills in a meaningful way. My first appointment was to a subcommittee of a division section committee (in other words, about as far down the hierarchy as possible), but we did some significant work, and it remains one of the most satisfying bits of work I’ve done for ALA.

Also, look outside your home division. The “type of activity” divisions (LAMA, LITA, ALCTS, RUSA, YALSA, ALSC, ALTA) often seek out members interested in their work, but representative of different types of libraries.

But … be honest with yourself when you volunteer. Think about what you can realistically commit to. It’s easy, really easy, to volunteer in the heat of the moment at a conference … and then get back to the office and the cold light of day on your to do list! Here’s a vignette to have in mind: As I was starting my first professional position, I was talking with F. Bernice Field, my supervisor and a past president of the division then known as RTSD—and an enormously long list of other achievements. I asked her how she got to do all of those things. She said, “Simple really. I volunteered, and then, by golly, I did what I was asked.”

If you can’t go to conference, try for a virtual membership on a committee.

Other options:
Join an Interest or Discussion Group. These work differently in each of the divisions that have them. In some, it’s pretty easy to become a discussion group leader, with the primary responsibility of organizing the next meeting. In others, the interest groups have no limit to the number of members.

Contribute in other ways. Post frequently on division email lists, blogs or wikis to get your name noticed.

A few words about the appointment calendar. The presidents-elect (those we elected in the balloting last spring, and who will take office at the end of the 2008 Annual Conference) have just had their orientation to their leadership roles and are now beginning the process of shaping the committees which will be working during their presidencies, 2008-2009. In some divisions, and at the ALA level, the slate of proposed committee members is reviewed during the Midwinter Meeting. Letters of appointment begin to go out shortly after the Midwinter Meeting, and acceptances are due back in the late spring. This is why there is a December deadline for the ALA form—and it’s a time frame to keep in mind for all divisions and round tables, as well. But know that there may be vacancies at other times–or some committees may still have vacancies after the first round of appointments are made.

Where to find the volunteer forms or specific information on volunteering With apologies for the “alphabet soup” – see the ALA Acronyms list, if you need to!

ALA (Deadline: December 3, 2007)
Divisions: AASL — ACRL (Deadline: December 1, 2007) — ALCTS — ALSC — ALTA — ASCLA — LAMA –- LITA — PLA — RUSA — YALSA

Round Tables also have committees; start at the main “Round Tables” page to explore these. I found volunteer forms or other significant information for the following:

GLBTRT — GODORT — LIRT — VRT

Finally, don’t just take my word for it. Check out these other blog posts with tips and links related to the committee appointment process— for example, these two:

Molly Raphael, President-Elect of LAMA
and
Sarah Kelly Johns on the AASL blog

Karen

Last week, the Executive Board met in Chicago to do executive boardly things. As I tried to learn more about what they do, I was gratified to find a page on our site that lists the members of the EB and even includes pictures and email addresses for each of them.

More on the EB in an upcoming post, but one of the things they did was to select the candidates for the 2009-2010 presidential election. There’s more about this process in Article III of the Bylaws (sadly, you’ll need to be logged in as a member to view that link and you’ll have to jump ahead to page 48), but here’s the press release with some background information about both candidates and the 2008 election schedule.

“Camila Alire, dean emerita at the University of New Mexico and Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., and J. Linda Williams, coordinator of library media services for Anne Arundel County public schools in Annapolis, Md., are candidates for the 2009-2010 presidency of the American Library Association (ALA)….

ALA members current as of January 31 will vote on the spring ballot. The candidate elected will serve as ALA president-elect for 2008-2009 and as president the following year.” Read more….

I don’t see any blogs or campaign websites up yet, but I’ll post them here if I come across any. And in case your head is spinning figuring out the who is who, Loriene Roy is our current president, and Jim Rettig will be next year’s president (2008-2009).

It’s official - Rod Hersberger, ALA’s new Treasurer, is blogging away at http://treasurer.ala.org/, with open comments and an RSS feed. The main Treasurer’s Page on the ALA website is a bit dense with text (not Rod’s fault), so the blog should make current news easier to find and track.

“Market performance in September and the Fed rate cut in the middle of the month were both very good news for ALA’s long-term investment portfolio. At the close of business on September 29, the unaudited value of ALA’s long-term investments stood at $31,432,147….” Read more.

Find out in today’s episode of “ALA in Focus” from AL Focus, the video arm of American Libraries magazine.

Check out Rod’s announcement at 7 minutes in! Learn more about BARC on the ALA website.

On October 6, 2007, the American Library Association turned 131-years-old (and doesn’t look a day over 60)!

ALA was founded on October 6, 1876, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Thomas W. Bicknell, C. A. Cutter, Melvil Dewey (or do you say “Melvil Dui”), Samuel S. Green, Fred B. Perkins, James L. Whitney, and Justin Winsor (see the Charter of 1879).

As noted in the “American Library Association” entry by Grace T. Stevenson in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Volume 1, page 267; 1968), a resolution was adopted on October 6, 1876, that read:

For the purpose of promoting the library interests of the country, and increasing reciprocity of intelligence and good will among librarians and all interested in library economy and bibliographical studies, the undersigned formed themselves into a body to be known as the “American Library Association.”

Read more about ALA at the ALA FAQ page. See the detailed ALA History prepared by ALA Librarian Karen Muller for the ALA Professional Tips Wiki.

What would you give ALA as a present, if you could? Feel free to be creative!

Some general conference information:

• * The Midwinter event is not a “conference,” but a “meeting.” I often forget this and keep calling it the “Midwinter conference,” but I’m trying. This language reflects the fact that the event is a working meeting of the Association. Whatever you want to call it, next year’s event will take place in Philadelphia, January 11-16, 2008. The exhibit floor is open January 11-14.
• * The Midwinter 2008 wiki is up and open for business, so feel free to start adding content. I already put myself down for blogging it, and there are badges you can add to your site if you’ll be there, too.
• * Apparently our online form gets slammed hard when registration first opens, in part because that’s when housing opens (if I understand things correctly), so naturally the fact that advance registration for Midwinter 2008 started this week means you may encounter slow response times. If that happens, please bear with us while the rush dies down and keep trying.
• * A lot of people called to register, too. In fact, I heard that there are 60 people in the call center, but at one point there were 70 people waiting to get through. Guess folks really want to get registered and signed up for housing! There’s also an article in Tradeshow Week that notes attendance at Annual 2007 was up 1.1%. I think this is probably due to the increased collaboration between our Conference Services staff, the divisions/units, the relatively young Conference Communications Committee (first started for the 2006 conference in New Orleans), and strong outreach from our Membership Development office.