Finding the money to attend is an issue, time away from work is an issue, and for many of us, childcare is a major issue, too. I resent having to cobble together care for my son so that I can have an unproductive 45-minute meeting in a noisy ballroom.

And I really, really hope that the poster who said she affords conference participation by eating cup-of-soup for every meal was joking.

It has always seemed to me that the local chapters are rather separate from the national organizations and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who feels that way. I think ALA could learn a lot about how people are doing communication and providing member benefits at the local level and the ALA could also perhaps push (and support) some of their major campaigns at the local level, where change seems a bit more possible. I know it happens to some extent, but not nearly enough. The local organizations are also a great space for ALA to recruit people into national participation — especially if that participation can be virtual.

1. ALA/ACRL/PLA/AASL need to continue to work to demonstrate what members get for their money and to develop programs (not meetings) that make it worth the price of attendance (something, for example, that I think the Medical Library Association does a better job of)

2. ALA and its children need to get serious about virtual participation and put to rest bureaucratic rules that stifle that participation.

3. People like me (who get to Chair committees every now and again) need to take the lead from people like Meredith about how we can make the best use of technology to facilitate that participation (and Meredith is on one of my committees and I’m looking forward to it – she’s already been great on the discussion list)

4. For many, the locus of F2F meetings within the ALA family is local and regional, rather than national. I’ve said this before, and I see it again here. “Big” ALA/ACRL/Etc. needs to connect more effectively, support, and learn from the work that goes on in the chapters because, for all the reasons noted above, the chapters are where a lot of people (young, old, and in-between) are participating.

All that said, we’ve seen great progress in the last few years with programs like the ACRL Virtual Conference and the upcoming ACRL/LAMA Joint Spring Virtual Institute. Progress is slow, painfully so sometimes, but it’s there. Let’s acknowledge that and keep trying to make things better.

Get a grip, ALA Brass. Your hostility is not productive, and you are not the cool corporate mogul you’d like to be. It’s your kind of rude, exclusive tone and attitude that make energetic librarians leave the field for someplace where they don’t have to work with turds like you. (And hey, if someone can call himself balls mahoney, I can say turd.)

ALA should take the lead on conducting virtual conferences. So many librarians have earned degrees online, why not pay the rest of their dues online, as well? I thought librarians were supposed to be on the cutting edge of technology and its use in delivering information.

Save fuel, save money, save time, and avoid crowds during the flu season: Offer at least one of the two friggin’ conferences per year in alternative formats. More people would probably participate.

But I think we all know ALA is just not really capable of pulling such a thing off. I mean, just look at the Web site. Among the worst I’ve ever used.

I believe there are three principal reasons for this: (1) Conferences are revenue streams for national organizations. They have nothing to gain and much to lose from staging “cheap” conferences. (2) The people organizing and staging the conferences mostly get their travel expenses paid, so they don’t care. (3) A *lot* of people LOVE going to these things. For them, it’s fun fun fun and they treat it as a sort of working vacation. Personally that is not my idea of a vacation.

My advice: Don’t go to ALA. Spend your limited travel funds attending regional and state conferences instead, or attend the conferences of smaller and less pretentious national groups.

This is a reflection on our employers, not on the ALA organization. ALA has extremely reasonable dues and registration compared to, say, dentists.

I have a friend who is a dentist. Yes, he makes more a year than I, but less than double. He has mandatory membership in the ADA about about $500 a year + $590 a year for membership for the association in his area of specialization (not mandatory). Conference dues? $750 for the ADA annual conference. This does not count costs associated with continuing education courses, which are of course required for licensure.

This is apart from all of the other issues raised on this thread. I just read and hear the “high dues” claim a lot and need to differ.

I attended my one and only ALA MW this past year in Seattle. I paid for the whole trip out of my own pocket, but I did manage to arrange to stay with family in the area and to make the larger trip into a vacation. This seemed like a nice compromise to me.

Those committee meetings that I sat in on weren’t terribly sophisticated, and I did wonder what the big deal was about MW. In my own work, I am starting a new section within the New Hampshire Library Association focusing on information technologies used by librarians, and we have already begun collaborating using a GoogleDocs document. I don’t see why ALA committees couldn’t do the same thing.

Finally, I do think that while we are right to constructively criticize ALA’s committee meeting policies, we should guard against declaring ALA a useless and outdated organization. That seems like shortsighted and overly simplistic thinking to me.

p.s. Please visit the NHLA’s blog (wwww.nhlibrarians.org) and leave us a comment on our most recent entry! We would love to hear from you.