Two CRIV Member Resignations Prompt One Question: Why Has AALL Appointed a Paid "AALL Vendor Liaison" as Gatekeeper between the Committee and Vendors?

Last month two members of CRIV tendered their resignations effective immediately. Lucy Rieger was in her third year of committee membership while Caren Biberman was still in her first year. Why? Well one may say, well, I am saying and am not speaking for either Lucy or Caren, that our association has eviscerated this Committee's mission.

To be clear, let's remember that CRIV stands for the Committee on Relations with Information Vendors. The CRIV Charge includes:

The Committee shall foster positive, constructive and open communication between information vendors and the membership of AALL in matters relating to provision of information in any format.

The Committee shall serve as a forum and resource to provide constructive suggestions to vendors.

The Committee represents the interests of all AALL members, and neither it nor its members will represent or advocate for the benefit of only one publisher or information vendor when acting in their capacity as committee members.

(Emphasis added.)

Under the heading "Vendor Communications," the Committee's responsibilities include:

Serving in an "ombudsman" role, work with librarians and publishers to help solve problems of both an individual or wide-scale nature. By monitoring appropriate discussion lists and through other means, identify actual or potential problems that are appropriate for CRIV intervention. Investigate formal complaints and other informal reports of problems, assist in achieving fair settlements, and expedite communication of findings and solutions to the library and publisher communities by issuing reports... . ... Work with other AALL entities to monitor and participate in the discussion of fair trade practices in the legal publishing industry.

(Emphasis added.)

Meet the AALL Vendor Liaison. CRIV members aren't allowed to fulfill the above responsibilities. In a nutshell, the Committee is not allowed to communicate with our vendors directly except for the "most mundane interactions" to quote from Caren Biberman's letter of resignation. That's the job of the "AALL Vendor Liaison" now. The what? Our (need I emphasize “our”) association’s Executive Board last year wedged someone who was not a CRIV member between the Committee and the legal publishing industry. By way of an ex-officio appointment, an official compensated AALL Vendor Liaison position was created and added to the Committee.

No, this isn't the usual Executive Board member serving the usual perfunctory Board-Committee role.  Nor is it a HQ staffer assigned to help CRIV out by performing grunt work. We pay a working law librarian, just like all the working volunteer law librarians on CRIV, to do this job. The current position holder, Marian Parker, may be well qualified to volunteer her time and expertise as one among many actively engaged CRIV-ers but it certainly doesn't help the library-side of the library-vendor relationship when CRIV is effectively reduced to a committee of one.

Good Idea? Under our Bylaws, Art. IX. 4, "The President may make committee appointments during the President's term of office" but is an ex officio appointment that undermines the mission of CRIV permissible? Under our bylaws, Art. IX. 3, "When the Executive Board creates a committee, the Board shall designate its purpose, term and structure." However, CRIV is a long-standing committee with a purpose and structure that has been in place for years. One could argue that CRIV would have to be replaced with some new committee, let's call it CRIV-Lite, to make last year's Executive Board action right. But, let’s leave the Bylaws issue to association nerds. That's not what is really important here.

What is important is that our Executive Board's action was wrong, dead wrong. Here we are, we being institutional members spanning all law library market segments, in the midst of substantial change -- budget cutbacks, major product roll-outs, etc. -- when the one committee that can help put out fires under its duly sanctioned intervention mandate is reduced to waiting to hear if the AALL Vendor Liaison is, has, or even will consider taking some sort of action.

What have we heard from AALL about the current state of affairs in the library-vendor relationship this year? Ah ... oh, yeah, well Rob Myers, CRIV vice-chair and incoming chair of the Committee received a blow to the solar plexus by TR Legal when he requested that the Company cease its unsolicited shipments practice. That's all I can think of, you? Even CRIV members as a committee have trouble finding out what, if anything, the AALL Vendor Liaison has been doing this year.

Why? To the best of my knowledge this is the first time our professional association has usurped the mission of one of our own duly appointed committees by this means. Why? Is AALL afraid of losing ad revenue by unleashing CRIV to fulfill its mission? Is consumer advocacy an empty promise to the membership? Are there no serious library-vendor matters requiring attention?

When a BigLaw firm librarian who has served on TR Legal and Lexis advisory councils and whose phone calls to WEXIS power brokers will be answered because they know her name resigns during the first year of serving on the Committee like Caren has, folks need to stand up and take notice. The library-vendor relationship is ablaze with serious issues affecting all types of law libraries in differing ways, many with long-term consequences, and more so than at any time in recent memory. Our Executive Board, however, has decided it does not want willing and able experts from the entire spectrum of our membership base to collectively address them with our vendors directly.

I, for one, but I doubt I am the only one, want qualified professionals like Caren, Lucy and others who offer to volunteer their time and expertise to represent our interests in the library-vendor relationship to be able to do so. This is one of those rare AALL committees whose work benefits all institutional members in one of the most important areas of each institution's mission. I do not want their efforts mediated, stymied really, by a vendor relations gatekeeper appointed by the Executive Board. Do you?

End This "Experiment" Now! In my much younger days, when I perhaps naively thought making some sort of contribution to AALL activities was worthwhile, I joined the “little work” chapter committees like Nominations because I didn't have a lot of time to offer but did think persuading dedicated law librarians to become chapter officers was a "good thing." Looks like the de facto CRIV-Lite has become one of those "little work" committees at the national level; no dedicated law librarians need apply unless the membership puts a stop to this "new world order." 

Hopefully Caren’s suggestions, expressed in her resignation letter (below), will lead to much needed and quickly executed reforms in Denver. Incoming AALL President Darcy Kirk, Associate Dean for Library and Technology and Professor of Law, Univ. of Connecticut School of Law and our association's Executive Board ought to make it very clear that they intend to put an end to this, let's call it "experiment," that the AALL Vendor Liasion was a mistake and will be eliminated immediately, that our association funds can be put to much better use in other ways to address the library-vendor relationship, and that CRIV has a clear, unfettered mandate to collectively deal with issues by communicating with vendors directly.

Caren has been kind enough to allow republication of her letter of resignation. The letter was sent to Amy Eaton, Outgoing CRIV Chair, Catherine Lemann, AALL President, Rob Meyers, Incoming CRIV Chair, Christine Graesser, Board Liaison, and Marian Parker, AALL Vendor Liaison, last month. I believe it is required reading by all law librarians who give a damn about our association.

The above commentary is mine and mine alone. It’s up to the membership to bring CRIV back to life. [JH]

Biberman's Letter of Resignation from the Committee on Relations with Information Vendors

All,

I am hereby submitting my resignation as a member of the AALL CRIV Committee effective immediately.

I was very excited and honored to be appointed as a member but unfortunately the reality of the AALL CRIV Committee fell far short of what I expected. I would like to share with you my experiences and my thoughts in the hopes that perhaps you will take what I am saying as constructive thoughts and suggestions:

1. From July 2009 through April 2010 the CRIV Committee met once (at AALL) and had one phone conference (which was not until late April 2010). All other communications were via email. I would have liked to see more interaction among the Committee members especially as there were often issues worth discussing.

2. From July 2009 through March 2010 the CRIV Committee (as a whole) never received one communication from the AALL Vendor Liaison, Marian Parker. I was told that the CRIV chair did have some communications with Marian Parker but those were not shared with the Committee for some reason. It wasn't until April 2010 that Marian Parker spoke to the members of the CRIV Committee (I should point out I missed this call as I was in Dallas, Texas for Lexis Advisory Board and TRIPLL). Even worse though, in my opinion, was that there was little or no communication from Marian Parker to the AALL membership even though there were several major vendor issues during this time period. I strongly believe that many members would have appreciated communication from either Marian Parker or the AALL Board concerning these issues and what was being done by AALL to promote the interests of its librarian members. I understand that Marian Parker is now planning to have regular calls with the Chair with information being passed on to the Committee members so I do feel that at least is a step in the right direction.

3. From July 2009 through April 2010 there were often issues that some members of the CRIV Committee would have liked to take action on and each time it was discussed via email the message came back that the Vendor Liaison, Marian Parker, would handle the issue. In fact, when I first suggested an interview with someone from Thomson Reuters re WestlawNext so we could do an informative piece for our members I was told via email that I could not do that and that the Vendor Liaison, Marian Parker, would handle all “issues" regarding WestlawNext. I later was given the go ahead to do the interview and write the article which by the way got mentioned in several blogs as not going far enough. However, I felt constrained to avoid any questions that might be perceived as an "issue."

The long and the short of this is that I feel (as I believe do others) that CRIV no longer is a viable committee due to the appointment of a vendor liaison that AALL leadership seems to want to handle all but the most mundane interactions with vendors. As a member of AALL, I am not pleased that AALL is spending my membership dollars to hire a vendor liaison who has not communicated with the CRIV Committee and the membership and I am troubled by the thought of the Vendor Liaison being the editor of the proposed blog. I think not acting to help "put out the fires" that have arisen has not served the membership well. I think when AALL has members willing to interact with vendors on behalf of the membership as a whole it is unnecessary to hire someone to do the task. I also think there may be an inherent conflict in accepting sponsorship dollars from vendors when one is trying to represent the interests of the AALL membership which is first and foremost law librarians. I honestly don't know whether AALL should or should not accept sponsorship dollars, I recognize that it is a difficult issue.

Given the above I have decided that I need to expend my energies elsewhere and therefore am resigning as a member of the AALL CRIV Committee. I do thank you for the opportunity to serve on a Committee and feel like I now have a better understanding of AALL as an organization. I know there was some feeling at one point that I was making out AALL to be the "evil empire" but that is not at all the case. I do think change is needed but I also recognize we are volunteers doing our best for the organization representing our profession and I do applaud those efforts heartily. I thought long and hard about this email and revised it several times over the last month and sincerely hope you will take this in the spirit in which it is intended and not as a denunciation of AALL. The opinions expressed in this email are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my (firm).

Sincerely,

Caren J. Biberman