ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

News From the Sections

LAW AND POLITICAL SCIENCE SUBSECTION

Editor’s Note: The following letter was submitted for publication in College & Research Libraries. It was the opinion of the editors of both College & Research Libraries and College & Research Libraries News that since the conference was publicized in the News that the letter should also be printed in the News.

To the Editor:

As co-directors of a scheduled ALA Pre- Conference Institute on Legal Bibliography, we feel an obligation to explain why this institute was cancelled.

Our participation in the activities of the Law and Political Science Subsection of the Subject Specialist Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries made us aware of the great interest of librarians working with social science materials in legal literature. The good attendance at the meeting on the literature of the U.S. Supreme Court sponsored by the Law and Political Science Subsection at the Atlantic City meeting of ALA further convinced us of the interest of many librarians in legal literature.

Consequently, one of the undersigned, as chairman of the subsection, suggested the possibility of a Pre-Conference Institute on Legal Bibliography at Detroit to the Executive Secretary of ACRL, and received encouragement for it. We then proceeded to lay plans for such an institute, recruited additional faculty, and arranged for the institute to be hosted, at no cost to ALA, by the School of Law of Wayne State University. The Subsection Executive Committee met at Chicago at the Midwinter meeting of ALA, and final plans were approved by the Chairman of the Subject Specialist Section and the Executive Secretary of ACRL.

Subsequently, we arranged for free distribution to enrollees of sample copies of bibliographic tools, and a free cocktail party and dinner. All of this would have been available to participants for only $50.00, with practically no expenses incurring to the American Library Association; in fact, ALA would have received a substantial profit from the institute.

During the entire planning phase of this meeting, we received no support from ALA Headquarters. All typing and publicity had to be arranged for at our respective schools.

Suddenly, in the middle of May, we were informed for the first time that the faculty participants would be required, by an ALA regulation, to pay the fifty-dollar registration fee!

We felt that this was too much! We were willing to fulfill our professional obligation by paying our own expenses to come to Detroit and expected no remuneration for our time and services. We think that professionalism is not unilateral. We understand our responsibility toward our profession, but an organization such as the American Library Association must also respond professionally. To ask us, or our universities, to pay for an institute where our participation is to benefit others and not ourselves or our institutions appears to us to be most unprofessional.

Our subsequent attempts to determine the rationale for such a regulation have been without success. We have received replies from various staff members that the regulation does exist—but no one seems to know why. This experience tends to confirm the often-expressed statement that ALA seems to operate more for the benefit of its staff than its membership.

We sincerely regret the inconvenience we may have caused any librarian inconvenienced by the cancellation of the Pre-Conference Institute on Legal Bibliography. But if these events cause the American Library Association to reexamine this absurd regulation, we will know that all of the time and effort expended on the Institute will have at least accomplished some good.

Respectfully submitted, Roy M. Mersky, Professor of Law and Director of Research, University of Texas, and J. Myron Jacobstein, Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Stanford University. ■ ■