Who Pays to Attend ALA Conference Survey Results

84 librarians have completed my survey Who Pays for ALA. While that is a small sample, not enough to be significantly statistically accurate, it is enough to show that librarians are finding a variety of ways to attend the annual conference of the American Library Association each summer. It also is enough to show an inconsistency among libraries in whether they support their employees attending professional conferences.

The Questions

My survey only asks two questions.

The first asks who pays for the attendees to attend. The choices for the survey takers range from the attendees' employing libraries paying the costs to the attendees paying all the costs themselves. In between are other options.

The second asks the attendees types of libraries.

The Results

Here are the results, starting with the largest respondent group and descending to the smallest, with non-categorized respondents at the end.

Academic librarians:
12 - my library is paying the conference costs
15 - my library is paying part of the conference costs
1 - I am earning my way working for a vendor
6 - I am paying all the costs myself

Public librarians:
16 - my library is paying the conference costs
5 - my library is paying part of the conference costs
1 - I got a scholarship to attend
1 - I am earning my way working for a vendor
5 - I am paying all the costs myself

Non-profit agency librarians:
3 - my library is paying the conference costs
2 - I am paying all the costs myself

Job-seeking unemployed librarians:
3 - I am paying all the costs myself

Corporate librarians:
1 - I am earning my way working for a vendor
1 - I am paying all the costs myself

School Librarians:
1 - my library is paying part of the conference costs
1 - I got a scholarship to attend

Retired librarians:
1 - my library is paying the conference costs
1 - I am paying all the costs myself

Vendor librarian:
1 - I am paying all the costs myself

Others:
4 - my library is paying the conference costs
1 - my library is paying part of the conference costs
2 - I am paying all the costs myself


Totals:
36 - my library is paying the conference costs
22 - my library is paying part of the conference costs
21 - I am paying all the costs myself
3 - I am earning my way working for a vendor
2 - I got a scholarship to attend
0 - I am earning my way as a paid speaker

You can see all the survey submissions by clicking this permalink.

My Thoughts

Because the sample is small, I do not want to make grand pronouncements. Also, I see some flaws in my questions, as I did not specify exactly what conference costs were. I was thinking registration, hotel, meals, and transportation, but I did not list these. I think most respondents assumed this, but some may not have.

Still, I see some interesting results.

1. The portions of academic and public librarians having to pay all their costs themselves is relatively equal. Early in the poll I thought I saw academic librarians having to pay their own way and public librarians getting more library support, but the numbers approached each other as more librarians took the poll.

2. More public librarians had all their conference costs paid for by their libraries than academic librarians who often had to pay part of their costs. This is where I wonder if my questions were too vague.

3. It makes sense that the three unemployed job-seeking librarians paid their own way.

4. The number of school librarians in the poll seems rather small. As a group, this poll did not find them.

5. The results for non-profit agency and corporate librarians are not what I expected. I thought many non-profits would not have the funds to support librarians at conferences, while I thought corporate librarians would get support. The sample is small.

6. There are seven respondents from uncategorized libraries. Librarians work in a greater variety of situations than I allowed for in this poll.

7. I can see that there are stories behind all these responses. I wonder about the retired librarian who still has a library to pay the conference costs. I wonder about the person working for a vendor who had to pay his/her own way; was he/she actually the vendor/entrepreneur?
Did the public and academic librarians working for vendors get to attend any presentations? Who were all the librarians wanting to come badly enough to pay all their own expenses?

What Now?

I admit that I have not looked to see if anyone has studied the financing of ALA conference attendance. No one has commented yet to say that I should look at existing reports. I am sure that it can be done again in a more planned manner with more reliable results. This might be helpful in the future.

Why does it matter? I think the results show that high percentage of attendees do get support from their libraries. Paying all or part of the costs for an attendee is an accepted and good policy for libraries wishing to further staff development. Perhaps more thoughtful library administrators can use such findings to initiate programs to support their employees for future conferences.

Time Odyssey: Visions of Reference and User Services

Everything that reference librarians do may change in the next ten years, but they will still be needed. This was the consensus from four panelists at the RUSA President's Program Time Odyssey: Visions of Reference and User Services, one of the final presentations at the American Library Association conference in Washington, D.C.

The future is not magical, according to Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist from Intel. There are always unforeseen consequences of technological change. Libraries will survive, she said, as people want the library as a place and books are stubborn, persistent artifacts. Libraries are "centers of gravity" - important to society for the tradition they foster, for the distribution of knowledge, and for the stamp of legitimacy they give to the materials they collect.

Bell said that libraries have always been high tech. In the 19th century they broke ground in the use of indexes and filing systems that would be the backbone of business and government. In today's world there is a crisis in the disorganization of digital information. Society need libraries to make sense of the information explosion.

She went on to say that libraries are needed to preserve civilization. They have done it before, especially when Islamic libraries preserved classical Greek and Roman literature.

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project said that there is a new twist on Andy Warhol's statement about everyone being famous for fifteen minutes. In the Internet age, everyone is famous to fifteen people.

Rainie said we have several questions ahead of us. First is "What kind of Internet do we have?" There are more kinds of information and more methods of dissemination than ever before. Soon there will be smart doorknobs that know when the owner will come home because of Internet transmitted information. Is this good?

We have questions about our national information policy. Are we going to let rural areas and the poor be left out? Are we going to allow corporation to buy higher speeds than anyone else? Who owns information?

Third, we have personal identity questions and security problems to solve. The Internet was built by trusting people who expected good behavior. Some users have abused this trust, so the Internet needs to be redesigned.

Allen Renear of the University of Illinois told a long joke about a girl approaching the reference desk ten years from now. The point was that scholarly publishing, especially for scientific and technical knowledge, will no longer be reliant on expensive periodicals.

The most interesting statistic he mentioned is that scholars are reading many more articles now than ten years ago but in the same length of time. So reading is not as deep. In ten years it is thought that scholars will be reading only little bits of articles as needed.

Wendy Schultz of Infinite Futures said that there will still be reference desks in 2017. She said librarians are in a great position to thrive, as they will be needed more than ever. She urged librarians to plot out alternative futures as to be able to adapt to the actual outcomes as they develop.

He Reads ... She Reads: The Booklist Adult Books Readers Advisory Forum

On Sunday at the American Library Association, I spent the entire day attending readers' advisory programs. I capped the day with He Reads ... She Reads: The Booklist Adult Books Readers' Advisory Forum, a sort of Point Counterpoint formatted discussion between David Wright of Seattle Public Library and Katie Mediatore of Kansas City Public Library, Missouri.

David went first. Through a series of humorous slides, he let the audience know that the readers that concerned him where not "men" but "guys." Serious reading men may not differ so much from women in their reading, but guys have their own desires. Here is what studies show about guys:

• Men read less than women.
• Men value reading less than women.
• Men read less fiction/literature.
• Men read more factual material.
• Men read more newspapers and magazines.
• Men read more science fiction.
• Men are not interested in the lives of women.
• Men who read have narrower tastes.
• Men are more likely to read everything in a series.
• Men do not want to talk about the books they read.

When Katie talked about women, the points were mostly the reverse of the list above. She did also say:

• Women do not care whether a man or woman wrote a book, while men often only consider books written by other men.
• Women will stick with a book longer before deciding not to finish a book.
• Women are more likely to join book clubs.
• Women consider romance novels like chocolates or massage - they are treats to read.

Throughout the program, both speakers used fake book jackets for laughs. (There must be a pulp fiction book jacket generator on the web, but I have not found it yet.) These were funny and sometimes almost crude, but they really supported the discussion. David also kept the crowd jumping with pulp fiction giveaways. About half the audience left with a paperback book.

One of the genres that got a lot of discussion was westerns. Though many libraries do not even collect them any more, David said they are very popular with guys. Seattle loans tons of them. He said it was important to keep up with the new series and to buy all the titles, as those guys who want to read them want to read them all.

Katie said that many women really like bloody suspense titles. She recommended the books of T. Greenwood for women.

David said that pulp fiction that comes in series can be treated as periodicals. Subscribe to the series. Get lots of copies. Do not bother cataloguing them.

In the questions period at the end, Katie said that if you are serious about readers' advisory, you approach clients to offer your service. You can not lay back and wait for someone to ask. You also have to use displays, book marks, and other marketing ploys continuously.

Another long discussion arose from the audience about librarians' spouses who bought books instead of checking them out from libraries, especially in regard to pulp fiction. Some of these spouses, especially the guys, want to own all the books in a series so they will have something they like to read over and over. Others fear overdues. Many of the librarians in attendance said they had spouses and friends who would not use the library because they hate having to have books back at a specific time.

Wiking the Blog and So Forth

What are they looking at?

I have posted a report on PLA Blog about the American Library Association Conference program Wiking the Blog and Walking the Dog. Above is a photo from this program. Matt Gullett, John Blyberg, and Jed Moffitt were watching Tom Peters' Second Life slides.

There are reports on many other programs from a variety of bloggers at the PLA Blog. Enjoy.

The Future of Information Retrieval

Monday at the American Library Association Conference began with an overflow crowd to an obviously inadequate room for the hot topic presentation The Future of Information Retrieval. Four panelists (not listed in the conference book) discussed the trends that they foresee in professional and amateur research.

Marydee Ojala of Online magazine and the blog Online Insider issued a warning. She said that the Internet 2.0 movement reduces the effectiveness of tools for the professional researcher, as free Internet resources muscle out the more precise fee-based databases that have been the backbone of the research industry. The databases that survive modify themselves to be more like amateur search engines. She compared an intricate search strategy from a database with a one-word search engine query, saying the former will obviously get a more precise result. Users of search engines accept top ranked answers while information professional want right answers.

Ojala said that the free search engines are obviously attractive, but corporations with interests tamper with their results. The integrity of research is challenged.

Jay Datema, technology editor for Library Journal, sees five trends in information retrieval:

1. Older resources are becoming available on the web.
2. More authentication is being demanded.
3. There are more ways to distribute and receive data.
4. Privacy is challenged.
5. Use of mobile devices for retrieval is increasing.

Datema cautioned that Internet searches have become commodities. They may be free of charge to the end users but at the price of privacy as all their transactions are monitored.

On a brighter note, he spoke about back runs of newspapers and periodicals breaking the "nothing before 1980" rule in database contents.

He recommended watching a new search engine called Powerset, which is in beta testing.

Datema said that there is an amazing lack of control in the digitizing of books. In the interest of speed, many mistakes are being made and the quality of some images is poor. He said the digitizers are making all the same mistakes made in the rush to microfilm documents in the mid-20th century. Regardless of the quality issue, he said that digitized books will allow for (1) faster interlibrary loan, (2) more print on demand, and (3) a boom in historical research.

Mike Buschman, a technical editor for Microsoft Live Search, was less critical of the book digitization effort. He said that Microsoft is working with the University of California, University of Toronto, Cornell, New York Public, and the British Library. He said that there are currently 40 million items from 30,000 journal in addition to books on Live Search Books.

Buschman sad the digitization of print is important because the web has only about five percent of the world's knowledge. Many forgotten resources are now getting new life in digital form because they are being found through online searching.

He posed four benefits of digital research:

1. increased efficiency
2. new research connection (data found in unexpected resources)
3. enhanced texts (with comments and hypertext links)
4. liberated forms (not rely on loan of physical items)

He also said we will stop thinking of the resources as books as we mine their sentences and paragraphs.

R. David Lankes of Syracuse University described a trend in librarianship. He first spoke about a failure - an attempt by his university library to create prepackaged generic search aids. They were never of much use to any library users. He said his clients had specific, not generic needs. As a reference librarian, his strength is helping people with their specific research needs. Every request has a context. Advice without a context is weak.

Lankes indicated that reference librarians have job security because they can not be replaced with digital documents. Every client needs the reference interview, which he called "the conversation."

He said that there are other conversations, some of which are digital. An academic course syllabus can be a conversation if it is loaded onto the Internet and loaded with hypertext links. A librarian should still monitor and update it. Also, librarians can start collaborative bookmarks, which become conversations among the participants. The knowledge value in these efforts is in the conversations, which gives context to the information being exchanged.

The role of the librarian is to be a conversation facilitator and community advocate.

Lankes thinks that the profession has gone as far as it can go with metadata. The future of librarianship is in service.

Librarians Wait to Cross the Street

Librarians Wait to Cross the Street
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

The American Library Association Conference in Washington, D.C. is almost over. I heard unofficially that it was a record turnout, but I have no numbers. That will be coming in the next few days.

What will also still be coming are more reports on the programs on this and many other blogs, as bloggers find time to sit down and write. There is a list of bloggers covering the conference on the ALA conference wiki. You can probably spend weeks going through all the reports.

My favorite program so far was the presentation by Ken Burns on Saturday morning.

My worst experience was a program on academic humanities librarianship (I won't be more specific) at which the moderator went on and on, almost forgetting to let her panel speak. In that same program, no one on the podium could figure out how to run the slide show that one of the panelists had on a CD. Another of the panelist knocked all of the Internet sources in his discipline. The program was a downer and I left early.

I enjoyed meeting several people with whom I've had numerous virtual conversations.

While the conference experience this year has not had the sense of mission that we had last year in New Orleans, it was still good. My list of books to read and websites to check is much longer.

Nancy Pearl on Book Crush

The young librarian in a Mohawk, clicking her knitting needles, laughed at Nancy Pearl's stories. I laughed, too.

(Pearl said today that first sentences are important for hooking readers.)

I did not do my homework, so I did not realize that Pearl's new book Book Crush is aimed at children and young adult readers' advisory until she began speaking. She told us that a teen librarian had recommended the title and concept to her. Because she was looking for a new project and because her More Book Lust had included some recommendations for teens, she decided the idea was good for her to target young readers. She drew on her own memories of being a child and a parent to start the project, and then she read hundreds of books in its research. She also interview many children about their reading tastes. Her aim was to include in her reference book titles children like and want to read, not those that adults recommend to them.

In Book Crush, Pearl tried to arrange the titles creatively. One of her concerns is that librarians with their categories often narrow the range of recommendations instead of broadening them. Children and teens have moods that call for different types of books at different times. She is trying to escape from genre labels.

Pearl told us how she had refrained from putting some old classics into the new book because she thought they had inappropriate racial stereotypes. A few others she kept with notes that the misrepresentations could be discussed between parents and children. She also said that there is a movement to rewrite some classics to remove objectionable materials. The example she used was that Rosemary Wells has rewritten Lassie without stereotypes.

After telling us about Book Crush, Pearl read first lines from some of her favorite children's books to show us how important the openings are to setting tones for stories. I wrote down many titles to seek out later as she read. (I was inspired then to write the first line of this blog piece.)

Throughout the presentation, Pearl made quotable statements. Here are two that seem most memorable to me. Put them in your quote books:

"We have only one life, but through books we can lead other lives."

"Other people have lives and I just read."

I think that Pearl actually has a pretty cool life. I hope she keeps reading and writing for us.

Pearl, Nancy. Book crush : for kids and teens -- recommended reading for every mood, moment, and interest. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2007. ISBN 1570615004

Ken Burns Previews "The War"

"There are no ordinary lives," according to Ken Burns, who focuses on individuals to tell his stories about historical events. In his new documentary series The War, he and the crew of Florentine Films anchor the story of World War II on the experiences of people they met in four American towns: Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. Like his series on the civil war, baseball, and jazz, he weaves together interviews, still photos, archival film, and period music in this production, which will premiere on PBS in late September.

Burns said that many people have requested that he make a series on World War II, but he had resisted for years. He changed his mind for two reasons. First, he read seven years ago that a thousand WWII veterans were dying every day, and he realized that many of their stories were being lost. Also, he read in the late 1990s that a poll of high school graduates revealed that many thought the U.S. fought with Germany against the Russia in the war. Being interested in the power of history, he had to address these problems.

Burns admitted that he keeps making the same film over and over. The question he is always asking is "Who are we?" He uses the same techniques and always combs libraries and archives for "the grist of all the films." He and his researchers visited hundreds of libraries in the making of The War.

I was impressed by the eloquence of Burn's speech, which reflects on his skill as a writer. I was also impressed by the seven segments of the documentary series that he previewed for us. Burns has gone far beyond the sanitized footage of the war that we normally see. The series will have to have viewer warnings.

I know what I will be doing with fourteen and a half hours this fall.

Update on Who Pays for ALA Survey

So far, 58 people have taken the short survey on who is paying for their attending ALA in DC this year. At first, it appeared that the majority were paying their own expenses, but later submissions have turned the trend toward their libraries paying their costs. The tide flows back and forth like totals on election night.

Here is what we have so far:

16 people are paying all their costs themselves.
13 people have libraries paying part of their costs.
27 people have their libraries paying their costs.
2 people are working for vendors to cover their costs.

The survey is still open for submissions. Tell us who's paying for your ALA experience.