This is the last post of the evening, I swear. I have made clear my problems with the American Library Association (ALA) in the past, and these problems stem from what I have seen from the inside, having actively participated in ALA and attended many, many ALA conferences over the years. Recently ALA began publishing a somewhat glitzy, heavily graphics oriented email newsletter called American Libraries Direct. I’ve read that some other librarian bloggers have trashed it but my initial thought was something like, “Hm, not bad. At least they are making some attempt at technological relevance.”

However when I perused today’s edition, in the ALA News section, my eyes were drawn to a blurb stating something about “ALA Recruitment Assembly launches recruitment website.” I then read more about the new site, www.librarycareers.org, and how it is focused initially on providing information on why and how to become a librarian and will soon be expanded to provide links to available jobs in librarianship. This really bothered me. Why? Because there are at least three excellent, well known, and widely used websites already out there that cover most if not all of the same territory as this ALA creation! These include Rachel Singer Gordon’s LISJobs.com, Priscilla Shontz’s LIScareer.com, and www.libraryjobpostings.org, maintained by Sarah Johnson and Rachel Singer Gordon. To be fair, some of these are mentioned in the www.librarycareers.org site. But still, my perspective is, why should ALA waste their efforts (and money) on reinventing the wheel? Why didn’t they or couldn’t they reach out to these well known, librarian operated sites and offer to partner in some way with them?

With the money they could have saved by doing this, maybe they could have put more effort into improving their horrible website.

It’s late, I’m probably overly grumpy, and I need to go to sleep.