I was pleasantly surprised to find something new in my e-mail inbox today. As a “keeping up” enthusiast I’m always on the prowl for new publications offering recent news and developments to add to my keeping up regimen. AL Direct, from the American Library Association, is a new weekly e-newsletter that “features news stories from American Libraries Online, ALA- and library-related news, and other items of interest from the ALA website.” It’s graphically well designed, slick, easy-to-read, links to full text, and is generally informative – lots of things I like. And to top it off, they even included a link to one of our ACRLog blog posts. Great idea! So what’s not to like. Just this item from the description:
“sent to ALA personal members by e-mail as a perquisite of membership”
Come on ALA, this is a good resource that can help members of the library profession to improve their personal professional development. Why restrict it to ALA members? Here’s the text of an e-mail message I sent to the newsletter’s feedback department:
I would encourage ALA to make this a free newsletter service that is available to any member of the library profession – or other disciplines – who would like to be on the mailing list. It’s nice to offer members a premium service, but librarians are challenged enough to keep up with the field, and this could really help them. Perhaps you could be like other industry newsletters and offer the newsletter for free, but make some of the links available only to members. This way librarians who are non-members could get a feel for the value of being a member and it might encourage them to join. Keeping them off the mailing list ensures they’ll never have an opportunity to explore the value of AL Direct.
To their credit I quickly received a response from American Libraries’ Senior Editor, George Eberhart (a nice guy with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working). He was open to my suggestion, but acknowledged that being this was the first issue they are still considering how to develop the newsletter. He did suggest that all of the newsletter content was available in free sources, but that for now ALA members would get the convenient digest – a member’s perk. Fair enough. I hope it will eventually become freely available, and when it does I’ll add it to the Keeping Up Web Site.
If you are a current ALA member, enjoy your issue of AL Direct. If not, consider joining to take advantage of this new benefit of membership – or hang in there until ALA sets it free.
I’m an ex-member and the newsletter arrived in my inbox. So they are not being that strict about it.
It’s worth noting here that LJ Academic Newswire, that started out as a subscription-based e-mail service, is now available for free. They must have learned something along the way that prompted them to do this – and they’re part of a for-profit business, not an organization.
This is an interesting front on the free/fee battlefield. As I’ve noted in a comment elsewhere, the New York Times and Washington Post have taken different paths on this – the Times with their “select” service and the Post making content freely available longer so blog links will work longer. We have yet to find out which model is going to be the one that ultimately works.