AALL's Draft Strategic Directions Statement for 2010-2013: Good Job as Long as It Does Not End Here

In case you missed it, AALL announced the release of its draft 2010-2013 AALL Strategic Directions last week. The draft statement is republished below along with our association's 2005-2010 Strategic Directions for side-by-side comparisons.

Draft 2010-2013 AALL Strategic Directions (text)	2005-2010 Strategic Directions (text)
GOAL I: LEADERSHIP Law librarians benefit from a strong Association. A strong Association articulates the collective vision of law librarians and enhances the stature of individual librarians as leaders in their workplace and in access to legal information. Increase public, government and the legal profession’s recognition of AALL as the premier resource on legal information issues and the law library profession. Support the development of law librarians at all experience levels as leaders in their professional environment. Create more opportunities for members to hold leadership positions within AALL. Increase and improve communication and collaboration within the Association and with its entities and Chapters. Strengthen fundraising model to expand membership benefits, grants, and scholarships. Position AALL members as leaders in green practices for law libraries.	GOAL I: LEADERSHIP Law librarians will be recognized and valued as the foremost leaders and experts in legal information, research, and technology. Objectives: Provide tools to increase members’ abilities to position themselves as essential to the mission of their organizations Provide leadership training opportunities Expand mentoring programs and opportunities Increase AALL participation in organizations within the legal and library communities
GOAL II: EDUCATION Law librarians will have the education and training they need to meet and leverage the challenges of the changing information environment. Support and expand an affordable education curriculum based on the core competencies. Develop specialized educational programs addressing the diverse needs of members. Broaden our use of formats, media, and technologies in education program development to provide a productive experience for all members. Research the desirability and feasibility of developing a certification program for law librarians. Collaborate with library and information schools to promote law librarianship and participation in related educational opportunities.	GOAL II: EDUCATION Law librarians will have the education and training they need to meet and leverage the challenges of the changing information environment. Objectives: Expand the scope of educational offerings to meet the ever-changing needs of members Develop partnerships to increase the range of educational offerings Use a wide range of delivery means and opportunities to provide education beyond the Annual Meeting Increase the number of library school programs for law librarianship and increase awareness of law librarianship as a profession Increase the number and amount of grants and scholarships
GOAL III: ADVOCACY Law librarians will influence the outcome of legal information, technology policy, and librarianship issues of concern to AALL members. Increase communication to law librarians, their employers, information vendors and the public about the value of law libraries and the critical role legal information professionals play in society. Partner with legal and information organizations to promote the financial and economic benefits of employing law librarians. Promote the value of public law libraries at the local, state and federal level including the need for appropriate funding levels and policies. Promote AALL policies that support members in establishing fair and equitable business relationships with legal publishers. Expand communication channels with information vendors regarding products, product development, and related policies. Continue, as an Association priority, advocacy efforts to ensure the authentication and preservation of online legal resources. Advocate for no-fee public access to government information and for all government information to be in the public domain.	GOAL III: ADVOCACY Law librarians will influence the outcome of legal information, technology policy, and librarianship issues of concern to AALL members. Objectives: Increase resources available for advocacy efforts Continue to expand international role Improve grassroots participation in advocacy efforts

I'm sure the leadership and education goals are important but at this late stage in my so-called career, the most important thing that matters for me is that our professional association becomes an agent of change, which for far too long it has not been. "A little too late, is much too late" is how I characterized AALL as an advocate for change.

Advocacy as Strategy. Assuming that the bullet points under the Advocacy Goal are objectives like the bullet points were in the 2005-2010 Statement (clerical omission, most likely) the Draft Statement's advocacy objectives are a substantial improvement over the lame 2005-2010 advocacy objectives. It is high time AALL address at the strategic level in some specificity the vendor-library relations, authentication and preservation of online legal resources, and no-fee public access to government information with all government information being in the public domain. Prior to the Draft Statement, all this was buried in a vague AALL core value statement published as a lead-in to the 2005-2010 Statement which stated " AALL values ... Equitable and permanent access to legal information."

Certainly AALL committees, special committees, SIS groups, etc., have pursued these objectives in recent years. Some with success, some not. Some past efforts undoubtedly could have achieved some or more success if AALL elected officials (1) engaged in active campaigning for them by taking a stance publicly, firmly and at the head of the pack instead saying nothing or trailing the pack as an also-ran institution and (2) staffed-up committee work by directing HQ employees to spend time supporting the work of committees (e.g., the current work of CRIV Committee comes immediately to mind, see Caren Biberman's comment to this LLB post) even if that meant hiring additional staff -- there's plenty of unemployed law librarians available -- and paying their salaries by substantially increase our ad rates (like West and LexisNexis would stop paying for ad space in AALL's email distributions to members et cetera, et cetera).

Call for Draft Statement Comments. Comments on the draft are invited here. The deadline for submission is Friday, March 5. The Executive Board will adopt the 2010-2013 Strategic Directions at the Spring Board Meeting, April 9-10. As a strategy statement for advocacy, I believe the drafting committee has done a good job. No quibbling over some wording from me.

Going To Do Something? Assuming the Executive Board approves the Draft Statement (like that won't happen, LOL), will this end here? A strategy without tactics is nothing more than an empty promise to the membership. An action plan was not part of the drafting committee's mandate (nor should it have been) so no criticism of the committee is intended or implied. But if the April 9-10 meeting doesn't produce an announcement to the membership outlining in specificity actions the Association intends to take to realize the stated advocacy objectives it just may be time to write off AALL.

What actions are our professional association going to take to:

• advocate at the policy level for the establishment of fair and equitable business relationships with legal publishers which also means campaigning against the "take it or leave it" approach to conducting business under the current market structure and publicly rebuking and sanctioning legal publishers who view being "partners" with the law library community by what few institutional buyers view as fair and equitable business policies and practices.
• advocate for greater transparency through expanded communication channels with information vendors regarding products, product development, and related policies which means something more than a toothless "fair practices" statement and informal chats with publishing executives by, for example: (1) the creation of an online database of licensing agreements sufficiently redacted to not reveal institutional buyer that contains agreements voluntarily contributed by law libraries, organized by library type, and accessible to member institutions for plan and pricing comparisons; (2) an AALL-supported resource of model licensing clauses law libraries could consider using to counter boilerplate agreements by addressing local needs; (3) annual price indexing of print supplements by vendor-supplied current information accompanied by institutional-provided actual paid-for price increases for prior years to track discounting trends; (4) data specifications that vendors should follow or at least libraries could insist upon for detailed and comprehensive product and services information; (5) customer service standards that call for major publishers to assign identified staff members to each library for billing, payment, purchasing and dispute resolution matters; and (6) search service usage reporting standards which require major vendors provide detailed and current information of on-site usage of search service databases accessible to law library contract administrators online and on-demand.
• advocate to ensure the authentication and preservation of online legal resources which, at a minimun must include data specifications that require digital access to all, including the disabled legal researcher, in an open source format.
• advocate for no-fee public access to government information and for all government information to be in the public domain, which at this moment in history means going beyond supporting the Law Library of Congress' vision of LAW.GOV to supporting the LAW.GOV project itself.

An announcement after the meeting that it is too soon to announce what actions will be taken because the Executive Board just approved the Statement is laughable and about as insulting to members' collective intelligence as what some of our vendors spit out in official statements. An announcement that a "committee will be formed to draft an action plan" will not satisfy the get on with it or get out of the way frustrations many rank-in-file members have with AALL. By the time any such action plan was drafted, circulated and approved, it would have to be re-titled "What AALL Should Have Done."

Either our elected officers and board members know what needs to be done or they don't. Which is it? [JH]