Target Audience: Law librarians battling to safeguard public law library service against proposed state budget cuts that—should they become reality—challenge its very existence
Learning Outcomes:
1) Participants will identify alternative advocacy strategies devised by public law librarians (state, court, and county) aimed at preserving their operations in hard economic times.
2) Participants will be able to select, from among these alternative strategies, a blended advocacy plan—drawing elements from other states, but tailored to fit their own unique jurisdictions.
Faced with hard economic times, state governments are pinching savings from every budget line-item, often at a huge cost to public service. Protecting law libraries in such an environment requires a coordinated strategy. Unfortunately, there are 50 states, each with its own unique context. No single “master plan” fits all. Sharing experiences can, however, show what works—and what does not work—in particular circumstances. Such knowledge enables each individual to profit from the collective experience, extracting those elements that forge a productive local strategy. This program will constitute a culminating event built through speaker-structured conversation in the AALL Members Only section of AALLNET. This continuous online discussion—interactive and always current—fosters strategy-sharing in distinct, volatile environments. All speakers, networking from process inception until the Annual Conference, will draw from this raw material a strategic paradigm: a menu of alternatives that, in some combination, may prove useful anywhere. It is expected that this process, presently targeted for 2011-2012, will be ongoing. Building collective strategies never ends. It progresses from year, to year, to year.