Upcoming ALA Midwinter
Friends,
I'm heading to ALA Midwinter on Friday, so you will begin to see blogs from me as meetings occur. So far, the major discussion on Council list has been regarding a resolution to make electronic communications, specifically email lists, open to all membership. ALA has an open meeting policy, which applies to all face-to-face meetings held at any time during the year, except for meetings such as nominations, awards and a few others. The exceptions are only those where the discussion of those applying for grants or considered for awards, etc., would be need to be done in private for obvious reasons. Because the electronic communications are not considered meetings by the policy, they do not technically fall under that policy. The proposed resolution would attempt to make sure that electronic communications, again except for those that would fall under the same issues as closed meetings, would be available to membership in a "read-only" format.
It is interesting how much discussion this has started. One comment was along the lines that much of what happens on the lists is just wordsmithing and other fairly detailed and boring tasks and why would anyone want to read all of that who didn't have to! While that is probably true, I do not understand why we would want to keep that information unavailable to the membership. If they find it boring, they do not have to read it, but I do think it should be accessible.
Unless the resolution changes drastically by the time we get it on the floor, I anticipate supporting this resolution. I strongly support a transparent organization and especially one where there should be a very limited amount of information that would need to be confidential.
This is the only issue that has been raised so far on the council list, so don't know what other issues may arise during the conference. I'll keep you posted.
Rob Banks
Kansas Chapter Councilor to ALA