PLA Blog

While looking at the posts by the prolific bloggers at the Midwinter Meeting (not just PLA, but YALSA, LITA, etc), I came to realize that the content represented a theory espoused by Kathleen de la Peña McCook about libraries within communities. McCook is known for her civic activism and “Librarian at Every Table” mantras. In order for libraries to be involved at the community level, librarians need to have a place at every government/civic meeting that takes place within their local communities.

To me, “A Blogger at Every Table” means that we have an obligation to our fellow librarians to represent and relay important information to those who couldn’t attend the numerous meetings at these events. Why do those who don’t have the money or the time have have to feel slighted from the discussions that took place? In this day and age of instant electronic content delivery, they don’t.

If we were able to, I would have loved to have a blogger at every open meeting at Midwinter. In fact, I wonder how many (out of all of the divisions who blogged) we actually transcribed and delivered to users. I also wonder how many bloggers were at these meetings but didn’t report on them on the division blogs because they felt that didn’t have “permission” to. As far as I know, many of these meetings are open to everyone (Award committees are closed, for obvious reasons), and that should be an indication that they are free to be blogged. The minutes from these open meetings are usually available (in theory), so why not make the discussions available to everyone on a blog?

My point: I’d love it if all of the divisional blogs worked together to get as much content from these meetings online as possible. This not only takes commitment, but an conscious agreement among the bloggers and blog administrators to share information. Call it a divisional blog consortium. More on this as I flesh out ideas…

It should be noted that this was probably the best blogged ALA event so far, with far more information reaching those who couldn’t come to San Antonio. Taking a look at all of the meetings in the program guide, however, we have a long way to go to get full conference/meeting coverage, which has always been my goal as a conference blog co-coordinator. Onward!

Tags: ALAMidwinter2006, conferences

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.