A few critiques
I just finished filling out this year’s ALA membership survey, and I feel the need to vent. I’ll be upfront and admit that some of my ire is probably borne out of the survey’s poor design. For one thing the forward and back arrows on each page were on opposite sides of the screen, and not the sides that would make sense (I know that’s nitpicky). My bigger issue is the bias that was apparent in nearly every question. Most were of the form, I get a large value out of my ALA membership, agree or disagree. Oh and there was no space for comments, but hey that’s what the internet was made for after all.
So no, I don’t feel that I get a great deal of value. The ALA does accomplish a great deal at the macro level within the profession, but for a medium sized library like mine they are largely irrelevant. The effect I see there is a subscription to a magazine that tends to infuriate me (as readers of this blog must know by now), discounts for attending a conference that I’ll be able to go to the next time it’s in Boston (since it was there 3 years ago this might take awhile), a catalog for an advertising campaign that’s older than I am (and who exactly is the target audience for a Tim Gunn read poster?) and a weekly e-mail that I actually do like (mostly because it aggregates articles from sources besides the ALA). They could do so much better.
Tags: ALA, American Libraries, criticism, design, librarians, libraries, membership, survey
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