Due to the the uncertainty of things in Charlotte, I won’t be able to attend the ALA Annual Conference later this month. I’m sad that I won’t see the many friends I have met through ALA. My son is very disappointed to not get to see Barack Obama’s “house.” But we can save that for another time.
I’m thankful to my colleagues who have volunteered to fill in for me at the presentations I was scheduled to do at both the preconference and conference. The week of ALA is also the last week of the Library’s fiscal year. The week before the new, reduced budget begins. Even in the best case scenario there will be more than 100 additional staff laid off and there are plans to merge some departments with the county. The Library won’t know its final budget until city and county officials meet next week to vote on their final budgets. The last two weeks of June will be busy and stressful no matter what the outcome.
This I do know–no matter what the decision–no matter what the budget–I need to be in the office to help our staff (in whatever ways I can) get through this transition. So with that I am sending my regrets to ALA 2010. Please keep the staff and our library customers in your thoughts and prayers.
On a brighter note the Learning Round Table has a fabulous line up of programs for the conference starting with a preconference on e-learning and ending with Battledecks (which I hope someone will record for me)! Check out the list of Learning Round Table programs here: http://bit.ly/cfOBD5
This week my son graduated from Kindergarten. This was our first year in the public school system and we could not have been happier. We have a great school, fantastic teacher and teachers’s assistant, and a wonderful after school program. It really does take a village!
Here’s a video from the end of school celebration. My son is the one with the dance moves!
It’s no secret that libraries around the country are facing devastating cuts. My own library had to give back $2 million with only weeks left in the fiscal year and at the same time County leaders advised us that we would face a 50% budget cut in July. At that time the Library laid off 120 of our staff–my colleagues and friends.
I’ve been pretty quiet online for the past few months about my personal experiences and feelings in all of this. Instead I’ve channeled my energy into a new website SaveLibraries.org in hopes that advocacy efforts can be shared and aggregated. The site has taken off and has almost become a second full-time job. While maintaining the site keeps me busy and keeps me from thinking too much about my own personal situation, every email, every post, every tweet reminds me that this fight for libraries is far from over.
So it was bittersweet when the local news called me to give an interview about the site. This isn’t the kind of publicity anyone wants to have. Though I am happy to talk about my work and the site, I would much rather focus on the value of libraries. If stories like this can help get the conversation started then the site and my efforts will have succeeded, but we also need to ask ourselves why we need to have this conversation in the first place. The fact that we need to tell people why libraries are valuable is a problem, a big one! It should be obvious in the work we do and the services we offer.
Please note that the site is SaveLibraries.org. WBTV got the link wrong in several of the visuals.
Today I gave the opening keynote for the Quebec Library Association Annual Conference whose theme was libraries as learning organizations. Here are the slides from the presentation.
Montreal is a beautiful city and the people are very friendly. I’m amazed at how easily everyone transitions from French to English in conversations. We should strive for this level of personal bilingualism in the US.
