GLBT News solicited each of the current candidates for ALA President to submit a guest column for our membership. The News Committee nor GLBTRT officially endorses any candidate for ALA office.
I’m JP Porcaro and I’m running for president of the American Library Association; let me tell you how I got to this point. I was feeling very depressed in January of 2013. I had just come off of a hard time in my life, which we all have, and I was dealing with a large disagreement in the ALA Think Tank, which is social media’s largest space for librarians and a place I built with a few friends. It’s at over 11,000 members, which is about 1/5 the size of the ALA, so of course disagreements come up when you put lots of passionate people together in one place, but it was hard to see that then.
ALA Think Tank started as a small answer to a bunch of the large problems: how do we get involved in the ALA when we’re under/unemployed , how can we afford travel and housing without work funding, how can we make an impact in libraries via our national association? We just said: let’s talk about it. Let’s make a Facebook group to talk about it. We used the group to figure out housing shares, we’d throw get-togethers in houses we’d rent at conferences, and we did everything we could to involve everyone in the conversation. Our growth was a direct result of the energy of change emanating from the group.
And that January of 2013 a bunch of us ALATT people found ourselves at the GLBTRT Social at a bar in Seattle for Midwinter. I got to have a wonderful conversation with Dale McNeil about “the old days” of the GLBTRT when it was the Gay Liberation Task Force. He told me about the grassroots nature of the group: how they’d have parties in houses before they became official! That conversation pulled me out of the funk I was in and gave me the resolve to keep going. Look at GLBTRT now; I had no choice but to keep going.
So here we are, a few years later, and I’m running for president on a platform of three major issues in librarianship.
- Firstly, nary can you find a librarian who is not facing budget crunches. What we know from the data (specifically, OCLC’s 212 page report “From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America”) is that to increase funding, we need to start with targeted messages to the public about librarians and library workers.
- Secondly, and again we know this from the data (specifically, a comparison of the 1985 ALA Equity at Issue report, the 2012 report from the ALA Office of Diversity, and data on the American population from those time periods) is that we are only doing marginally better as a profession at attracting POC and we’re actually doing worse than we were in 1985 vs. the American population as a whole.
- Thirdly, these two issues mean that ALA membership is dipping every year. If we’d like to see a large, important, and effective Association moving forward, we need to address these issues.
We need to positively address these issues, we need to make the changes necessary to see these issues addressed, and we may not have much time left to do it. What I learned from the conversation that night at the GLBTRT Social is that if we know there are issues that need changing, we need to do it. Together we’ll make it happen.
