Free LISSA membership if you join NCLA & ALA

As we reach the longest day of the year and fall still seems far away, it’s never too early to join LISSA, our program’s ALA-affiliated student organization.  Again this year we will be offering a free membership to LISSA if you apply for a joint student membership to ALA and NCLA.
To apply for a joint ALA/NCLA student membership online, fill out this form.

To apply offline and pay by check or money order, print out this application and mail it to: American Library Association, Membership Services, 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611

Joining these organizations can be helpful in your job search as well as provide conference, networking, and mentoring opportunities.

When LISSA meets in the fall, you may show us your ALA and NCLA membership cards in order to receive a free membership.

Happy Summer!

Job market & the New Members Roundtable

In the latest Job Talk column on the ALA website, Emily Love gives us some reasons why we might feel hopeful rather than hopeless about the library job market. She mentions possible retirements of older librarians (though the majority of these are not predicted to happen until 2015) and job mobility (librarians are eligible to work in the US, Mexico, and Canada through the NAFTA agreement). While Love admits that the economy is not in the best state, she wants to give new grads a look on the bright side. New librarians will have to work harder to find a job, but there are still jobs out there. American Libraries Online reports that the economic stimulus package will fund libraries, so perhaps the job market will improve with greater funding.

Love also mentions that LIS grads who are also members of the ALA New Members Roundtable are eligible for resume review services. The NMRT is a group that helps new ALA members become actively involved in the profession, and membership comes with lots of benefits like networking and the resume services mentioned above. It’s also important to get memberships like this on your resume to stay competitive for jobs!

Read the full Job Talk column here.
Check out the New Members Roundtable here.

Bound to the Word

Back in the summer of 2005, a young Illinois senator named Barack Obama was chosen to give the keynote address at the Opening General Session of the American Library Association‘s Annual Conference in Chicago. The speech was later adapted and published in the August 2005 issue of American Libraries. In it, Obama spoke about his own love of libraries, the role that librarians play in defending our privacy and freedom, and the importance of literacy.

Here is an excerpt from that speech (as good librarians, I’m sure you all know why we can’t post the whole speech, but I’m sure you all know how to find it!):

“…More than a building that houses books and data, the library represents a window to a larger world, the place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward and the human story forward. That’s the reason why, since ancient antiquity, whenever those who seek power would want to control the human spirit, they have gone after libraries and books. Whether its the ransacking of the great library at Alexandria, controlling information during the Middle Ages, book burnings, or the imprisonment of writers in former communist bloc countries, the idea has been that if we can control the word, if we can control what people hear and what they read and what they comprehend, then we can control and imprison them, or at least imprison their minds…

What some people may not remember is that for years, librarians have been on the frontlines of this fight for our privacy and our freedom. There have always been dark times in our history where America has strayed from our best ideas. The question has always been: Who will be there to stand up against those forces? One of the groups that has consistently stood up has been librarians. When political groups tried to censor great works of literature, you were the ones who put Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye back on the shelves, making sure that our access to free thought and free information was protected. Ever since we’ve had to worry about our own government looking over our shoulders in that library, you’ve been there to stand up and speak out on our privacy issues. You’re lull-time defenders of the most fundamental liberty that we possess. For that, you deserve our gratitude…”