ALA Marginalia

2007 was a banner year for American Libraries as it celebrated its 100th anniversary with the introduction of the CentenniAL blog, the AL Direct email newsletter, and the AL Focus online video site. Not content to rest on its laurels, however, AL has just opened a new discussion Forum where you can engage your colleagues about issues featured in the print magazine and other matters of general interest to our profession. It’s like “letters to the editor” on steroids, because you can post your opinion there without being limited to 300 words or less. You also don’t have to wait a month before your comment is published.

Participation in the Forum is free and is not limited to ALA members. Anyone can create an account and post a new topic or reply to an existing one. As any good discussion site would do, we encourage you to read the posting rules before posting to one of the seven forums currently available.

• Spanish-language Collections
• RDA
• 2007 year in Review
• Midwinter Meeting 2008
• Local Referenda
• Annual Conference 2008
• Suggest a Topic

I won’t normally repost items here that are found on other ALA blogs, but since there are two important items over on ITTS Update and most members don’t even know the blog exists, I thought it would be good to highlight it here.

If you’re interested in tracking the various projects ALA’s IT department works on, you can stay current by reading the blog. There’s an RSS feed available, or you can sign up on the blog to receive email updates of new posts. I work half-time in that department, and I can tell you things are really hopping there these days (not that they weren’t before my arrival). If nothing else, you may find the notes from the monthly update meetings we hold for staff interesting. Having said that, I don’t think there is one scheduled for January because of the Midwinter Meeting, but we’ll resume them in February.

The other caveat is that while we do post some information about the website redesign there, the project is larger than just ITTS, so there is a separate Web Planning blog (and wiki) where you can track happenings as we start down the road of actual implementation.

Back to the two specific ITTS posts I want to note:

• For the first time ever, we’re offering hands-on training sessions at Midwinter. More info here.
• At each Midwinter and Annual, the Web Advisory Committee meets to discuss various web-related issues and activities. This is the group that gives us direct feedback and input regarding ALA’s web-based services. Every six months, we prepare a report for this group in preparation for the face-to-face meeting. The Midwinter report is now available online.

We’re going to have open gaming again at Midwinter next month, although this time it will be loud and out in the open in the registration hall. We’ll be in the back, across from the Internet Café, so just follow the noise of the cheering crowds.

We’ll be rotating between playing Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Wii games on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 9:00 a.m. -  5:00 p.m. each day. We’ll also have the popular “blogger” ribbons to hand out, as well as fancy, shmancy, new “gamer” ribbons. Bring your skillz and if you come at the right time, you can face off against gaming gurus like Eli Neiburger.

Last week our internal Web Editorial Board saw a preview of the designs Userworks has mocked up for a new website. Well, a mostly new website, as the divisions are autonomous and we can’t force them to use any particular template. But we will have usability guidelines available for them should they choose to depart from the final design.

Previewing designs for the new website

Which is something you get to help decide. During our Midwinter Meeting (January 11-14 in Philadelphia), we will have a couple of kiosks onsite where attendees can view two final designs and give feedback. We’ll do the same thing online so that everyone and anyone can provide the same type of input. Think of this as “Website Idol,” where you the viewer get to vote for your favorite.

Although I think we all agree that almost anything would be better than what we have now, I believe the new design (whichever one is chosen) will be a true improvement. We’ll post again here (and on the Web Planning blog) when the survey and designs are available, so keep an eye out for them.

If you’re still on the fence about coming to our Annual Conference in Anaheim next year, here’s a little video to help you make up your mind from AL Focus. Even though the Midwinter Meeting is still a month away, we’re busy putting together a program with more than 300 sessions for you to choose from.

And soon, a special announcement for Annual attendees who like to play games….

There’s been a lot of discussion online lately about how to participate in ALA committees as a virtual member (you can find most of the links via the Improve ALA wiki, which was created by ALA members). As a result, we’ve started a new page on the Get Involved wiki for ALA committees with virtual members in order to make it easier to find those pieces of “the work of the Association” that allow for participation without necessarily requiring members to show up in person at two meetings a year. Some may still have physical attendance components, some will be completely virtual, some will be a workable mix of the two. Overall, we hope this helps you find a way to contribute that works for you.

Questions about any of the committees? Leave a comment here or use the discussion space on the wiki page. Know of a committee (or other workgroup) that’s not listed? Help us out and and add it to the wiki!

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

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.