Kansas ALA Councilor: ALA MidWinter Seattle I

Greetings from Seattle. ALA Midwinter is underway. It’s been cloudy and misty since I arrived, but the sun is out now and what I can see through the conference center windows looks great.

Last night I attended a panel discussion where three science fiction/fantasy authors, RA Salvatore, Laini Taylor and Timothy Zahn spoke about the rise in popularity of science fiction since 9-11. It’s always fun to hear authors speak about their work and what’s going on in their world. I’ll be glad to talk with you about what they said, if you are interested.

Today was an update from the ALA Washington office on issues and trends for this year.

The change in power in congress has made for a busy start to the 110^th Congress. Nancy Pelosi has accomplished a lot during the first few days, but the feeling is that things will slow down as business becomes more complicated. A number of moderate Republicans have crossed over to support Democratic issues. There is hope that the bi-partisan support will continue.

The Senate has started slower, but there is also indication that both parties desire a good working relationship. This may make for slow action in the Senate, but hopefully thoughtful action. One area of bi-partisan interest is education.

The budget was not finished during the 109^th Congress so that will have to be completed soon. The current direction is to revert to 2006 funding levels. This is good for many groups as there were a number of cuts slated for 2007 which will be reversed. The main

which won’t happen now. The hope is that this increase will re-appear in the 2008 budget and have minimal long-term impact.

Several acts were not re-authorized by 109^th Congress will need to be addressed this year, plus all of the issues that are up for this year. Higher education and Headstart are two of the issues for re-authorization. The indication is that congress wants to deal with these soon. An issue for this year is No Child Left Behind (NCLB). There are competing interests at work on NCLB so there will probably be quite a bit of discussion on the issue. Te thought is that it will be re-done in some form. ALA hopes to insert language that puts a highly qualified Librarian in every school.

A group of academics have done some work on participatory networks/social networking such as MySpace. Their report can be found at http://iis.syr.edu/projects/PNOpen/

The purpose of this information is to provide you information and assistance in explaining it to boards, constituents, administrators, whoever you need to discuss the issue.

Network neutrality, e-rate, universal service fund and several other pieces of legislation are up for discussion. It is felt that the current congress will be more sensitive to checks and balances on privacy issues, but that remains to be seen.

Baring a tragedy or some other significant issue it is assumed that nothing will surface on the USA Patriot Act, but if something happens, all bets are off.

Real ID Act. This act addresses a national, interconnected database for driver’s license information, etc. Current thinking is that some legislation to better secure privacy of personal information will be introduced.

Data retention by ISP. This has long-term implications for law enforcement. Terms and specifics are not agreed upon at this point.

EPA Libraries – Mike Flynn, Director Office of Information Analysis and Access EPA and several of his staff addressed concerns by the library community. He had three major points:

Where are we headed?

How do we plan to get there?

What is EPA currently doing and our next steps?

Where are we Headed – EPA will be the premier source for environmental information access

How will we get there – more info faster, increasing electronic format.

What is EPA currently doing and next steps - Increasing electronic delivery

Reviewing current spaces and resources

A study was done in 2003 – EPA FY 2007 Library Plan: National Framework for headquarters and libraries

A major goal of this plan is to increase electronic delivery – digitize collection

Second major goal - Maintain strong physical presence

Third major goal - Maintain library services for EPA employees and the public

There is a new FAQ on agency website.

Next steps

Analyzing stakeholder input on modernization effort

Expand and refine EPA library plan to ensure quality and timely services

Interested in input from all stakeholders – especially libraries

Access to documents during digitization process – maintaining inventory of documents available during process. According to Mike Flynn, all offices should have a method of ILL between collections, etc. Not the experience of a questioner.

Committed to complete digitization of “original” documents by January 31, 2007. definition of original group is expanding.

Committed to a dialog with library community. This was good in the past and needs to be improved for the future.

Opinions expressed by some present:

It’s good that they are talking to us, but it is too late for some regional libraries.
While they claim that they can provide electronic access to the core collection of documents and are committed to maintaining a minimum of one hard copy of all unique documents that are generated by them – It was not the experience of several present that documents are available and they even felt that there was little effort by EPA staff to find documents.
General attitude that libraries are dependant on these documents and want an excellent relationship with EPA, it was felt that we are not there yet!