A Lazarus Proposal
By Lillian N. Gerhardt, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 6/1/1998
When I read the report of the American Library Association's Spring Executive Board deliberations, I fell to wishing for official American Library Association membership meetings to come to life again.
The Board moved on two issues that used to light up the night and rattle the Council, before the membership meeting quorum number was raised in 1995, from 200 to one percent of ALA's member enrollment. That makes it some 550 now, a head count that's never been reached. Thus, we'll probably never know what some loose-cannon members might have said about the Board's decisions on two matters that beg for some rackety member debate: ALA's accreditation of programs leading to the MLS degree and the provision of recommended reading lists for the Boy Scouts.
On the first matter, the Board proposes to hold a summit meeting before 2000. But, without a membership meeting, the big heads tapped to go to some expensive peak to re-format education for library service won't get an earful from those toiling in the trenches. An open hearing jammed into an over-scheduled 1999 Midwinter Meeting won't be enough.
The Board also appointed a subset of its own members to study the policy governing ALA's external relationships and to make recommendations for any changes deemed necessary. This seems designed to smother a donnybrook debate at this month's membership meeting, which is also unlikely to achieve the 500-plus quorum that would allow voting on resolutions for Council action.
So who's been burying the membership meetings half alive, turning them into mere "chats"?
Was it ALA presidents who, instead of letting the meetings rip, over-programmed these sessions with panels on topics of little interest? Or treasurers with repetitive, over-long reports?
Was it ALA headquarters planning staff, through the assignment of inconvenient time slots and meeting rooms, too little publicity, and the failure to provide adequate transportation?
Was it divisions and roundtables that didn't require their officers or directors to attend and bring along some troops?
All of the aforementioned are ALA members, along with the 10,000 or so that register for annual conferences. The identification of the membership meeting's burial crew for the last few years is easy: it's all the members. But intensive care and radical surgery on the 1995 quorum requirement could diminish their guilt.
It didn't seem a bad idea at the time, but based on bad results, the quorum should be reset to a three percent average of the last five years of member registration at annual conferences. The number would ride around 300. Achievable. Just as unrepresentative of the total enrollment as it's always been, of course, but a pulse ALA's leaders need to check regularly for new ideas and viewpoints, adoptable or impossible.
Which reminds me of my neighborhood's premiere eccentric during the Great Depression. Mrs. Fanzler believed that a ring of doctors, undertakers, and insurance agents were burying the comatose and catatonic for profit. Before the local funeral parlors barred her, she took to loudly advising the bereaved-in-charge: "Take a pulse. I saw a twitch. I heard digestive noises. There's life. There's hope."
I'm going to register Mrs. Fanzler's ghost at the 1998 Annual Conference in Washington, DC (June 25-July 2), and take her to the membership meetings. I can almost swear I've seen twitches and heard noises. Before the casket's closed, there may be life, and there's always hope.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
