What’s In a Name?
ITI Bloggers June 20th, 2009
As Gloria Zamora reminded me, the association now votes electronically, so SLA members won’t need to be in New Orleans to vote on any potential name change. Which is not a good reason to decide against attending next year’s conference, I should add!
But what might our new name be? I joined the Special Libraries Association years ago and lived through the time when SLA was equated to the Symbionese Liberation Army. Information professional seems to have supplanted librarian in our vocabulary. Yet many members cling to the notion of being a librarian. Maybe incorporate both concepts in a new association name? IPLA for Information Professional Library Association seems a bit redundant. IAIP for International Association of Information Professionals might work.
What are your ideas for a new name? Inquiring minds want to know. Comment here and send to Leadership {at} sla(.)org.
Marydee Ojala, Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals
Why not simply the Association of Information Professionals, provided it isn’t already taken.
The other popular AIPs in Google are the American Institute of Physics, the American Institute of Philosophy, Alaskan Independence Party, and Astrophysical Institute Potsdam. Not too much cross-over there.
While SLA may have mean Symbionese Liberation Army then (and I do remember it), now (to quite a few folks) it means Service Level Agreement. When I went to the library school at UNT a few years ago I have to admit to being in the dark about what a Special Library was and what one did there. As it turns out, while I was in school getting a Masters in Information Science, many Special Libraries were closed down by the company because, you know, everything is online and it isn’t hard to control documents and content, is it?
Be that as it may, renaming to something with Information Professional probably covers it better these days than the word library, which, unfortunately, is primarily thought of as a community place to borrow books, and now other media. I don’t think you could win the language wars by trying to change that now.
Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez! I’ll eat a beignet in honor of the New Orleans conference.
To me use of a term other than librarian opens up the profession to
virtually anyone.
But I dislike using “library” as in ALA or MLA. I like Medical
Librarian Association for example.
http://groups.google.com/group/libraries-need-librarians