To ALA or Not?
Someone on a list I'm on recently posted that they were hesitant to renew their ALA membership because of the recent ALA press release scandal. You can read about it on Librarian in Black here: http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/alastatements/ . The person who posted asked the group what they thought about renewing their memberships. Below is my response. I'm not a member of the ALA, but I work with them on issues concerning Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. I'm on the ALA EDI implementation Work Group and I try to represent marginalized people who can't afford membership or conference participation (among other things). I would say that ALA has been made progress due in large part to work by people like Melissa Cardenas-Dow, Trevor Dawes, Martin Garner and many others who are strongly committed to EDI in ALA and in libraries in general. I would also say that the constituency should scrutinize candidate's actual wor...