Ford in Drive
By Lillian N. Gerhardt, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 11/1/1997
Barbara Ford, the 1997D18 President of the American Library Association, has just taken a very important step that promises to benefit librarians in every specialty. She has announced the creation of an ad hoc ALA presidential task force to examine the professional values of librarianship in relation to such practices as outsourcing, subcontracting, and privatization of library services. The charge to the task force asks that it pay particular attention to the ways these practices conform to ALA's code of professional ethics for librarians.
The question of who should provide professional expertise is under continuous challenge these days in the fields of medicine, law, teaching, engineering, and other professions. Now librarians -- better organized in many ways than other professionals -- are seldom (if ever) able to delineate the shared core values of the many specialists within librarianship. Ford's task force moves us toward this. ItO3 a good direction for librarians and their organizations to take -- before 2000.
Ford followed her announcement of this task force with a request for input from ALA members about its make-up and agenda. It will be a crying shame if Ford doesn't hear plenty from librarians serving children and adolescents. You can write to Ford at 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611 or bjford@vcu.edu.
As we go to press, there is no information available on Ford's first appointments to the task force. However, we can surely expect the officers of the three ALA divisions devoted to youth library services to bestir themselves to propose the appointment of their best-equipped, policy-wonk members. Ford's task force needs strong voices from among youth services librarians on both the philosophical and the practical dilemmas that arise from efforts to reduce costs by farming out work to commercial agencies.
The fact that ALA's youth services divisions have not taken any official positions on such incendiary issues as the outsourcing of materials selection and collection development, the subcontracting of programming, or the privatization of whole library systems is hardly a blot on their records.ALA's Council postponed action on these matters more than once in the last year while calling for more information than any source had at hand.
The fact is that ALA and its units were not prepared for the onrush of such events as the handing over of Hawaii's public library collections to a book wholesaler, the privatization of the Riverside (CA) Public Libraries, and the jobbing of suburban libraries guided by undisclosed user profiles of unexamined validity.
Looking backward, ALA and all librarians should have been prepared. The handwriting on the wall was the steady reduction of federal library services as the result of outsourcing during the Reagan administration. That these practices would trickle down to state and local governments was not foreseen or taken up by anyone except ALA's big Government Documents Round Table.
Hindsight says that Ford's task force to examine our professional values and the commercialization of library services is more than a decade overdue. Good sense dictates that we rejoice in an ALA president who has provided a mechanism to quell the dithering on a troubling trend in the administration of all libraries.
School Library Journal's lead feature article this month ("The Invisible School Librarian: Why Other Educators Are Blind to Your Value") is about our need to tell a wider world what we do, why we do it, and why our work is necessary. The conclusions drawn by Ford's task force promise to help every specialty in library service define itself. Ford deserves full encouragement, support, and admiration for exercising her leadership to galvanize others to needed action.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
