President's message.

In my first column, I mentioned that the LITA board's main objective is "to oversee the affairs of the division during the period between meetings." Of course, oversight requires communication. Sometimes this is among board members, or it's an e-mail update, or a post to the LITA-L discussion list, or even the articles in this journal. Regardless, I see the cornerstone of "between-meeting oversight" as keeping the membership fully (or even partially) engaged from January through June and July through December.

As a mea culpa for the board, but without placing the blame on any one individual, I am willing to concede that the board has not done an adequate job of engaging the membership between American Library Association (ALA) meetings. While ALA itself is addressing this problem with recommendations for virtual participation and online collaboration, LITA should be at the forefront of setting the benchmark for virtual communication, participation, education, planning, and membership development.

In an attempt to posit some solutions, as opposed to finding someone to blame, I first thought of the LITA committees. Which one should be responsible for communicating LITA opportunities and events to the membership using twenty-first-century technology? Education? Membership? Web Coordinating? Program Planning? Publications? In the end, I was left with the choice of two evils: merge all the committees into one so that they can do everything or create a new committee to deal with the perceived problem.

Knowing that neither of those solutions will suffice, I'd like to put the onus back on the membership. Maybe I'm trying to be a 2.0 librarian--crowdsourcing the problem, that is, taking the task that might have been done by an individual or committee and asking for more of a community-driven solution. In the past, LITA focused on the necessary technologies for crowdsourcing--discussion lists, blogs, and wikis--as if the technology alone could solve the problem. The BIGWIG Taskforce and Web Coordinating Committee have shouldered the burden of both implementing the technology and gaining philosophical consensus on its use--a daunting task that can easily appear chaotic. Now that the technology is commoditized (and generally embraced by ALA at large and other divisions as well), perhaps it is time to embrace the philosophy of crowdsourcing.

Maybe it's just because I have had cloud computing and web-scale architectures on the brain too much lately (having decided that it is impossible to serve two masters-job and volunteer work--I shall forever endeavor to find the overlap between the two), but I sincerely believe that repeating the mantra that LITA's strength is its ...