Why do the vendors roll out new versions in September??!!

This year, Lexis has chosen to roll out a new version of Lexis Advance on September 8!

Why thank you guys!

Isn't that just the most thoughtful thing?

Librarians and teachers around the world are just loving having a brand new version that they need to scramble and get comfortable with just as their students are arriving.

Why couldn't they have released this back in June?

Well. I am guessing (with my cynic's hat on), that they didn't really want any testing and reviews floating around out there to taint the trumpet blasts and floating glory clouds as they rolled this out to students.

Of course, maybe they just hadn't finished debugging it in June. Maybe I shouldn't be so cynical.

Vendor-Librarian Negotiations

Dear Colleagues, 

       A little while ago, I forwarded to members of the AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus an e-mail I had received. A researcher was requesting librarians to participate in a survey on vendor-librarian interactions, in preparation for his presentation at the Charleston Conference. I have sent tech services staff to that conference and they have always found it excellent, so I participated gladly, and encouraged any members of the caucus willing, to participate as well.  I received an e-mail back today, with instructions on how to receive the results, and info on when the presentation will be at the Charleston Conference.  I hope others will be equally interested in this:

Thanks to all of you who responded to my Vendor Negotiation Survey last month! We had a tremendous response rate – well over 200 respondents. Responses are wide-ranging and thoughtful, and offer great insight into the library’s perspective on the negotiation process and dealing with vendors. Anybody that is interested in receiving the results, please type “SEND ME THE RESEARCH DATA” in the subject of an email and send to info@data-planet.com . We will be sending the results out on or about November 14th.

For those of you attending the 2013 Charleston Conference, I’ll be presenting Secrets in Vendor Negotiations with Carl Grant (Associate Dean, Knowledge Services & Chief Technology Officer, University of Oklahoma Libraries & former Chief Librarian & President of ExLibris and President of VTLS) and Mike Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC), on Friday, November 8, 2:15 pm – 3 pm. We’d love to see you there! For more information and to register, visit here. We will provide actionable takeaways you will be able to use immediately in negotiations with your technology, content, and service providers. I firmly believe that more clarity in the process of negotiations provides a more level playing field, opens up budget dollars for new and innovative products, promotes greater competition among vendors, and raises overall product quality.

Of course, I will be attending sessions and would love to talk to anyone interested in all the innovative things we are doing with statistical content at Data-Planet. We have published 19 guides on statistical content since June, and will soon release overview statistical guides for US states and subject categories – our guides have direct links to infographics, DataSheets and data, providing much more detail available than any other statistical compilation. For a sample, take a look at our Climate Change subject guide. And even more exciting, we are getting ready to preview our next generation Data-Planet Statistical Datasets UI – a JAVA-free version with more powerful charting, new mapping, and much simpler and cleaner usability. We will start to preview the new Statistical Datasets interface to current customers in December. If you haven't seen it yet, we have added Snapshot Statistics to our Ready Reference interface. All Snapshots include related data links, DOIs, infographics and links to the full DataSheet.

The e-mails have been from Matt Dunie, who turns out the be the president of Data Planet.  Should be interesting, since data gathering is what they do.  

Professional Association versus Trade Association

Would the AMA be more like a trade association if they suddenly began admitting drug company representatives as AMA members with the full membership rights to vote, be committee members and become members of the executive board? Why not? It’s the “American Medical Association” not the American Doctor’s Association, right? So anybody interested in medical things ought to be able to join, right? So why can’t drug reps and medical supply reps join that organization? Interestingly, the doctors have begun to see the ethical problems posed by their longtime close relationship with the drug company reps, and painfully begun a separation process (see NY Times article from 2007).

Would the AALL be more like a trade association if we changed our bylaws so that vendor reps had all the membership rights that librarians have? Would the antitrust issues that the specialist lawyer spoke about, concerns over price-fixing and rigging markets become more of a concern with an association if the consumers as well as the providers were full members of the association? Maybe we already have become more like a trade association and just didn’t notice.

I don't know if we need a scandal or some big books to wake us up to the problems that we have between law librarians and our vendors and publishers. We depend on each other, just as doctors and drug companies do. But there needs to be a bit more arms' length, and bit more care about the appearance, as well. And it gets difficult to maintain both the arms length and the appearance when everybody is a member of the same association and everybody is on the decision-making, even when they can be pressured, subtly or not, by their employer, against their own better judgement.

I like and I respect as individuals many colleagues who work or have worked for vendors. It does not make a librarian (or non-librarian) a bad person to work for Lexis or Thomson-West or any other vendor or publisher. But I can see very easily that if I worked for one of these outfits and then I were on a committee at AALL, and my boss came to me to lay some pressure on me about an outcome, I might feel a lot of concern about my job and my family! How much more would this affect our association if the position were on the executive board?

AALL changing definition of Active Members!

AALL members have been changing their duties. Firm librarians as well as law school librarians have changed their titles and their duties, sometimes entirely dropping more traditional librarian sorts of duties. We thus have law firm marketers, competitive intelligence workers, and academic deans who still identify with AALL and would like to still be active members of the association. Headquarters staff had asked for a change in the bylaws because the old definitions no longer fit current reality.

According to a conversation with Darcy Kirk, the Bylaws Committee first offered an amendment that tightened the definition of an active member. The Executive Board sent them back with directions to broaden the definition, instead. And did they broaden it! The new definition is so broad that it would extend the rights to vote and hold office to any employee of a legal publisher or other company that has consistently violated basic consumer protections in our Association’s Guide to Fair Business Practices. Some members are concerned that a significant ethical problem would unfairly burden such employees elected or appointed to offices in which their activities could directly or indirectly influence AALL policy or action on consumer advocacy, or could reasonably sustain the perception of conflicted influence. Of course, the issue remains debatable. In fact, our colleagues debated a similar issue of conflict of interest in 1987. The debate ended without resolution, but such acrimony accompanied it that repeating the controversy now seems to concerned members no small risk that our Board can and should avoid. The Board would effectively confer its imprimatur on the expanded definition of active definition by approving it in its present form for the membership’s vote, even though some members do not agree that the proposal should carry this de facto seal of approval.

As a result, a number of calls to various Executive Board members have been made. It appears that the Board still plans to vote on the Bylaws Committee change at its meeting this July. They may accept the proposal as is, or may change the language themselves, table it for later consideration, or send it back to the committee for more work.

Darcy points out that a change to the Bylaws this close to the annual meeting means that the 60-day waiting period would prevent any membership vote at the 2012 AALL meeting. So, if the Executive Board votes to accept the Bylaws Committee proposal, there will be a 60-day waiting period for members to consider the change. Members will have the ultimate say on whether to accept any change! Pay attention!

There will also be an opportunity for questions at the Business Meeting and Members' Forum on Monday, July 23, at 4:15 PM in Hynes Convention Center Ballroom B! If you will be at the annual meeting, and have questions, you can e-mail your questions ahead of time to ambusmtg@aall.org. The deadline for submitting a resolution passed on July 2, sadly.

Here are some talking points:

• Members were not well-apprised of the initial proposal to change the bylaws at the Board's March, 2012 meeting. Relying on the Board Book to tell general membership about important issues is NOT the kind of transparency members reasonably expect of the leadership!
• Members were not adequately informed of the request to the Bylaws Committee to broaden the active membership definition that took place at the March, 2012 meeting. Ordinary members should NOT have to dig through the Board Books and sift through 149 pages in them to find information that bears on ALL of our interests! This DOESNOT satisfy a reasonable expectation of transparency, but invites a suspicion, however misplaced, that the Board has tried to sneak a change past the membership.
• This has been a very divisive and rancorous issue in the past – when the issue of vendor membership was raised more than 20 years ago in 1987, it was a very bitter, emotionally charged town meeting.
• Changes to the Bylaws require a 2/3 approval of the full membership. An active minority will spare no procedural effort to defeat the proposed change in its present form. No one wants an avoidable conflict. The Board can still has means to avoid precipitating a conflict that otherwise seems inevitable..

Calls for Comments on the AALL Vendor Action Plan

Margie Maes, Vendor Liaison for the American Association of Law Libraries, has posted a request for comments on the new action plan for vendor relations. You can read the action plan and comment on it on the AALLNET Vendor Colloquium page. A group of librarians feels that the proposed action plan doesn't go far enough in addressing long-standing concerns about AALL's commitment to consumer advocacy. In response to the request for comments, a number of AALL members have joined together to draft a group response, which follows:

Dear Vendor Colloquium Working Group:

Thank you for inviting AALL members to comment on your Action Plan. The undersigned are among AALL members who want AALL to revitalize its commitment to consumer advocacy. Some of us bring to our recommendation many years of experience as AALL members and law librarians.

We appreciate your dedication to improving librarian-vendor relations, and we support goals designed to aid communication. However, the Action Plan has a serious shortcoming: it falls far short of AALL’s promise as a consumer advocate. The “partnership” ideal endorsed in the Action Plan appears to apply to all legal information vendors, whether or not they have extensive histories of anti-consumer practices. In fact, you do not define "partnership" or “consumer advocacy,” and appear to limit consumer advocacy to discussion during an Annual Meeting program. At any rate, we support the idea of engaging smaller legal publishers, under Goal II-C, and any other legal-content vendors who follow consumer and antitrust law in their business practices.

Even before the ongoing economic crisis, law libraries could not afford the cumulative costs of anticompetitive and unfair business practices by some vendors of legal and law-related information. In 2006, an attorney for the Information Access Alliance testified on skyrocketing subscription prices and unreasonable contractual constraints from single-firm, anticompetive conduct. Although his testimony concerns harm to research libraries from "bundling" of scholarly journals, the same type of conduct has harmed law libraries when they renew their subscription contracts. As described in a recent Library Journal interview, evidence also abounds of unfair business practices. A few of the many examples include:

• opaque, confusing, and deceptive pricing models for online subscriptions and for "bundled" portfolios of print or print-and-online subscriptions;
• non-disclosure demands in contracts;
• inclusion of more or fewer titles than requested in bundled subscription contracts, with inadequate or no options for correction;
• serious, widespread failures in editing, indexing, updating, and revising of publications

The business misconduct has reached a scale of devastating impact on law libraries. It has imperiled not just the quality and integrity of their services, but also, in many cases, their long-term sustainability.

Law libraries and allied consumers of information services should work together to remedy anti-consumer practices within the industry. They can do so without violating antitrust law. They may act in coalition to petition appropriate governmental bodies for remedies vital to their collective interests, and to the public interest.

We would rally behind AALL if it did everything possible to advance this vision of consumer advocacy. We would welcome collaboration with AALL’s leaders. So we recommend, as a first step, that AALL’s Executive Board embrace our proposal of a more robust consumer advocacy than AALL has pursued. At your request, my colleagues and I would be happy to elaborate on the proposal. We also ask that a future Colloquium focus on the means and goals of consumer advocacy, with digital or phone-conferencing access to all members, and a full, open record of proceedings.

If you wish to add your name in support of this comment, please contact Michael Ginsborg at michaelginsborg@yahoo.com. We expect to submit it to Margie Maes by the July 15th deadline.

Sold out! AALL sells us down the river

Well, thanks to Joe Hodnicki at the Law Librarian Blog, Sarah Glassmeyer at SarahGlassmeyerDotCom, and Greg Lambert, of 3 Geeks and a Blog, we know that AALL has requested that nobody blog live during the AALL Vendor Colloquium. So, not only is it not Webcast for us members who are footing the bill, it is not blogged or Tweeted.

Wonder why not?

Greg says at his blog...

I don't think you'll be seeing a lot of #AALLVC tweets today, as many of us were asked to wait and sit through the entire discussion before we start pushing information out. I looked at this the same way that I looked at when I got to look at WestlawNext last year when I went up to Eagan, MN. Many of you may not agree with me on this, but that's what I agreed to, and I will make sure that I keep lots of notes on what is said and will blog about it on Wednesday, along with my own personal commentary.

Mark Estes will be pushing out recaps (live blogging) at the AALL Spectrum Blog later today and on through tomorrow. I'll be talking with as many vendors, librarians and stakeholders as I can to get a feel for where I think we are heading as an industry of legal information professionals and legal information providers over the next few years. Like I said earlier... it should be interesting. Stay tuned for more...

Perhaps I am too cynical.

What do you think?