At possible risk of beating this to death, I want to observe that a close reading of my column would make it clear that I’m not a particularly enthusiastic advocate of carbon offsets; I did call them “bleeding heart environmentalism”, after all. I see credits as a distinctly less-than-optimal, second-best choice for showing leadership on the question of our jetting to-and-fro. I advocate them only because I’m skeptical that in the near term we’ll do what we really ought to do…

Personally, I think that we need to get beyond the talk about ALA’s marketing model — which I agree is dated and wrong-headed, with the vendor tail wagging the organization dog — and think about the vastly
larger question of whether this sort of professional activity is *responsible* behavior these days. To me the CO2 numbers suggest very strongly that it is not. I think we really should be focusing on moving to embrace appropriate technology tools — whether as humble as the phone or as sexy as web2.0 collaboration applications — as means to a greener way to conduct our business. If the outcome of this shift happens at the same time to be friendlier to our institutions’ and our own pocketbooks, so much the better.

My CAD .02.

The Open Meeting policy is easy to resolve. (Even aside from the question, what’s “open” about requiring people to fly cross-country to sit in on a meeting?) Just provide tools to allow people to participate, view, and read transcripts or recordings of meetings. That feels a lot more open than what we have now.

(Full disclosure: I’m the guy who responded to a survey about “how can we make ACRL Seattle greener” with the suggestion “It’s a pedestrian-friendly city. Run fewer buses and let the able-bodied bloody well walk.” So maybe I’m just a meaner nanny myself.)

But I do agree that we need to take a hard look at what Midwinter is for, and whether it’s accomplishing its mission.

The primary purpose of Midwinter is “expediting the business of the Association.” I suspect it does get a lot of work done which wouldn’t happen without a face-to-face sitdown. (Geez, sounds like The Sopranos when I say it that way.) But could we accomplish the same work with regional meetings more flexibly scheduled and technologically enhanced? No… I think we’d accomplish a heck of a lot more. But could we empower the committees to schedule their own meetings without blowing the Open Meeting policy?

Recruitment is also a major function of conferences. I’d leave it to ALA to respond about the effectiveness of Midwinter as a recruitment tool. (If I’m remembering the data I saw a couple years back correctly, we get a lot of new members from the location of the conference, but retention past a year or two isn’t impressive.)

But I think the real killer, as we’ve all already said, is that Midwinter, by design, isn’t effective as a professional development event. As a manager, I don’t get good enough ROI on those dollars… so I recommend people not spend them at Midwinter. That won’t change unless Midwinter itself starts to add more value.

Technology is not the answer to everything—there are few things more disturbing than looking at a giant screen on stage and realizing that the image on screen is the speaker’s left nostril—because some people have a ton of equipment and NO IDEA how to use it.

But overall, it seems much smarter to use the technology we’ve got now and coordinate smaller meetings in regional areas than to pull x-thousand people together every winter and summer. Maybe ALA should take a good hard look at its members and their financial situations … and the same for ACRL.

Regarding cataloging only rare and unique local materials—yes, great idea! I’m certainly qualified for that, and available.

Of course, the quality of records that you might see for everyday average books in WorldCat, input over the past 5 years or so, is somewhere between bad and dreadful, but isn’t that to be expected? So many libraries have decided to do away with MLS catalogers that we won’t really see the folly of their decisions for a few more years. By then, I fear, no one will even be able to effing read the writing that was on the wall, ugh, I mean the catalog card.