Comments on: ACRL response, ALA solicits website input, varied cheezburgers

By: Aaron the Librarian » Improving the American Library Association

Aaron the Librarian » Improving the American Library Association — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 04:33:38 +0000

[...] have been several posts of late and more and more , that got me to communicating (via Twitter, Meebo Rooms, IM, and email) with several [...]

By: Free Range Librarian » Blog Archive » ALA: What is to be done?

Free Range Librarian » Blog Archive » ALA: What is to be done? — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:21:33 +0000

[...] ACRL response, ALA solicits website input, varied cheezburgers [...]

By: Anna

Anna — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:11:04 +0000

I think we had only one or two folks from Elsevier at NASIG this year, and perhaps they missed your presentation.

There has been a serious decline in publisher participation in recent years, and it is a frequent topic of discussion among board members. NASIG won’t mean much if it becomes a librarian-only organization.

By: kgs

kgs — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 22:40:23 +0000

You should, and George Eberhart and Leonard Kniffel come to mind!

I didn’t get my AL Direct, but I suspect it’s Me, not Them.

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:41:50 +0000

as much as I like the concept of AL Direct and enjoyed its early days, as of late I find myself skimming it more often than I read it, and I am not sure why.

Heaven knows that I've been critical of ALA, but for what it's worth I find the AL Direct publication a refreshing change of openness. I do more skimming than reading (just the nature of the content) as well, and I like the layout, timeliness, and frequency of publication. Hmmm...perhaps I should say "Good Job!" to someone at ALA headquarters...

By: kgs

kgs — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:07:30 +0000

I understand that side of things, but most chatrooms and IRC channels feel “secret clubhouse” to me anyway. It’s really more how I feel in that kind of realtime environment (did I just say, it’s not you, it’s me?)…

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:40:27 +0000

The “secret clubhouse” feel was an unfortunate side effect of some pr0n spambots. I don’t like it either, but until Meebo gets its act together, there’s not a whole lot of choice.

By: kgs

kgs — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:55:01 +0000

Uh… there’s a blog? Well, my bad, Rob. Perhaps the last few months have been more distracting than I realized!

By: Rob Carlson

Rob Carlson — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:18:39 +0000

We have tried to keep everyone in the loop with the web planning blog and wiki.

By: kgs

kgs — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:10:15 +0000

When I couldn’t attend the retreat, I recommended a young, web- and usability-savvy librarian who was rarin’ to go, but was told that the retreat had enough of that demographic. With that went my one chance to have a better-than-average insight into what was going on with the redesign.

At the time, I cautioned about doing things the old ALA way, that is, emphasizing face-to-face meetings of the usual suspects. Keith reassured me (this is list traffic from the ALA list webplanningretreat, not private correspondence) that “I’m all for trying some of the approaches you’ve suggested, but they don’t need to preclude the f2f.”

Except, of course, they did. The upshot is that I and the rest of the great unwashed don’t really have any idea what the “usability and redesign process” has been up to. I’m not ranting… just observing.

The good news is that ALA is doing usability evaluation and that it seems as if it’s going really well, and we have a chance to see and react to the proposed designs.