Dessert receptions are evil and other observations from ALA Annual

My activities at ALA Annual were centered around the Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group, the most fun but worst named group in ALCTS. We've decided to simplify the name to "Metadata Interest Group," but for bureaucratic reasons, it isn't clear when we'll be able to officially change the name. Anyway, I did the following at ALA:

Saturday morning: Michael Babinec and I pitched a program proposal for ALA Annual '07 to the all-powerful ALCTS Program Committee. It sounded like they liked it, so we're going forward with the planning. It is tentatively titled "Bringing Order to Chaos: Managing Metadata for Digital Collections." It will be a two-hour program with three speakers. Each speaker will have 30 minutes and we'll end with 30 minutes of question and discussion.

Saturday midday: Fretted about our program scheduled for later that day. Michael gave a heroic effort in making sure all of our speakers were good to go.

Saturday afternoon (1:30 to 5:30): The program we sponsored, titled "Digital Rights Management and Institutional Repositories: Achieving Balance in a Complex Environment" went off without a hitch. Our speakers were great (Denise Troll Covey, Carol Hixson, Karen Coyle, and Edward Colleran) and there was engaging discussion. I would say there were two concerns. First, four hours is too long for a program. Second, the competition is fierce for attendees. We were scheduled in the same time slot as a LITA debate on searching and I image that siphoned off some people that might have been interested in our program. We had 90 in attendance, so we were successful, but we could have held more.

Sunday: Our NRMIG meeting featured a panel of five metadata librarians discussing what they do and the trends they see coming. The panelists were Arwen Hutt, Erin Stahlberg, John Chapman, Ann Caldwell, and Mary Beth Webber. It was standing room only: we had 40 chairs but about 60 in attendance.

Monday: I attended the ALCTS Presidents Program titled "Information Overload and the Quality of Your Life: Can a New Environmental Movement Restore Balance?" The speaker was David Levy of the University of Washington. Now, I like David Levy. I read his book "Scrolling Forward" and it is thoughtful and insightful. But there was something not right about the program itself. It seemed to be, well, spun by ALCTS as anti-technology, as I've mentioned before in this blog. I wish the emphasis had been more on "how can we serve the needs, and save the time, of library users by leveraging technology," but the feeling I got from the program is that attendees were taking his argument as a justification to cast technology in a malevolent light.

Lastly, I realized how insidious dessert receptions are. For some reason, librarians lose all sense of professionalism when it comes to vendor receptions. They fight over the invitations, they wax poetic about petit-fours. And this is how vendors seduce us into buying crap against our best interests. David Levy discusses in chapter nine of "Scrolling Forward" that the original scholarly journals were published by learned societies with a mostly philanthropic purpose. Commercial publishers came later. I think we need to start working back towards our philanthropic roots. Perhaps open access publishing is an indicator that some of us recognize this. Commercial publishers are accountable to company owners and company shareholders. I don't care how "good" of a company you are, this is a different motivation than what scholarly communication should be: it should be for the betterment of mankind. A profit motive corrupts that mission.