On Friday, June 28 I flew out to sunny (but blessedly cool) San Diego for the 2024 ALA Annual Conference. Only Mary Beth and I attended this year’s conference, which is quite the drop off from the dozen or so folks we used to send just 6 or 7 years ago. I was only able to attend meetings on Saturday and Sunday, because United helpfully rescheduled my return flight on Monday for an earlier time, preventing me from attending any sessions that day. Also, as an added bonus, I realized when I was at the Charlotte airport that I had my old expired University credit card in my wallet and that I would have to claim all my expenses (my new card was sitting safely in my desk back in Winston).

Despite these few bumps I had a good and productive conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to many program sessions, because I had a number of meetings that I had to attend as the outgoing Chair of the Core Metadata & Collections Section, but I’ll talk more about those later. Among the sessions I did attend, the most interesting one was “Values Driven Workflows: How Are We Implementing DEIA in Routine Work and Policies,” which consisted of three presentations. The title was rather misleading as the topics were not really about workflows. The first speaker was Jee Davis, the University Librarian at American University, and she spoke about including DEI principles in strategic planning (I wish I would have seen this presentation about 7 or 8 months ago). She spoke about how her university administration set inclusive excellence as a top university priority. The guiding principles of their strategic planning were: 1) Develop strategic goals and objectives with actionable plans, 2) Build accountability and follow-through, and 3) Use DEI impact as a key performance indicator. In order to reach their DEI goals, Davis argued that library leadership must model the way. After creating their plan, they have developed a number of programs with their campus partners.

The second pair of speakers were Sophie McGrath and Caroline Kravitz of the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL). They discussed how BPL’s development of a DEI policy led to calls for creating paths for education and employment among populations that are under-represented among librarians. In response BPL created a program that provides scholarships to library school for staff employees. It seems very worthwhile, and I was impressed that BPL has the resources to conduct such an expensive program.

The third speaker was Sofia Slutskaya of Emory University, who spoke about reparative cataloging, the practice of removing and updating potentially offensive terms from the catalog. She argued that the essential components of reparative cataloging are: 1) Engage community stakeholders and communicate changes, 2) Create and implement policies and procedures, 3) Consider internal stakeholders, 4) Educate staff and community. She said that you need to create a consistent user feedback experience that allows for the community to give feedback on offensive terms. She also pointed out that terms are ever-changing, and that changes may actually be offensive to some users. This final point has caused me a great deal of hesitation in pursuing any large or medium scale reparative cataloging projects. I am afraid of making the “wrong” change that will have to be undone because of the offense that the new term causes. Nevertheless, I will be having more conversations with folks throughout ZSR on this topic in the near future.

The meetings I attended as the Chair of the Metadata & Collections Section included the Core 101 meeting, where I presented on the work of the M&C Section and spoke to people interested in joining the Section and gave them advice on how to get involved. I also attended the Core All Chairs meeting, which involved a brainstorming session on fundraising activities for the Core Division. And at the M&C Section All Committee meeting I led a discussion of the results of a survey on the committee and interest group structure of the M&C Section. To give a bit of history, Core was formed by the merger of three ALA Divisions, including ALCTS (the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services) in September, 2020. The ALCTS Division was basically collapsed into the Metadata & Collections Section, with about a dozen ALCTS committees continuing in M&C, along with almost 20 interest groups. Over the last 4 years, there has developed an imbalance between the member engagements with our committees and interest groups. Some have lots of volunteers, others have difficulty attracting members or people willing to serve as chairs. Meanwhile, there are other topic areas that have no committee or interest group representation. While I was at ALA, several different members talked with me about the need to have Collection Development Committee, in part to justify the members’ involvement in Core. We are trying to navigate the line between having more committees than we can fill vs. not having enough committees to provide service opportunities for our membership. It was a major topic of my discussions at ALA and one I’ll be continuing to work on as Past Chair of the M&C Section.

Although Mary Beth and I were the entirety of the current ZSR contingent, I did talk with some former ZSR folks, including Derrik Hiatt (and separately his wife Rachel), Lauren Pressley (we got to have a good long catch up), and Wanda Brown (who was just elected President of the Black Caucus of ALA for a second term, and who, despite a rumor I heard, has no immediate plans for retirement).