Friends and colleagues

When you enter a new setting, you have a natural tendency to assume that the way things appear is the way they have always been. If there is a weekly staff meeting on the first Friday that you are in your new job, you assume that there have always been weekly staff meetings on Friday, and it may come as a shock some weeks later to discover that the innovation was first introduced only the month before you arrived and that everyone else was as uncertain about the way to proceed as you were.

I have been going to meetings of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) since 1987, and it was unnerving, when I started reading the articles celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the association that make up much of this issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA), to realize that this means I have been to roughly two-thirds of the meetings that have been held. The organization that I first became acquainted with was still finding its way and defining its purposes.

What I find most striking about the symposium in this issue, and what was so very apparent during the program at this past year's AAHSL meeting (held, as it is every fall, as part of the annual meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges [AAMC], this time in San Francisco in early November), are the stories of the people who invested so much of their time and energy to bring the organization to life. We fall into the habit of thinking of our professional associations as objective entities with lives of their own, but (except to the Internal Revenue Service) this is hardly the case. The organizational structure embodied in the bylaws, providing the rules for continuity, is only the shell, the lifeless form. These groups thrive or die according to the energy and will that the members breathe into them.

Gerald Oppenheimer retired from his post as director of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Washington about the time that I became involved with AAHSL, so although I knew his name, knew what he looked like, and knew a bit about his reputation, he has not been a direct presence in my professional life. But there he was, on that Saturday in November, telling the story of the founding of AAHSL and the role that he and others played (the same story that is told by Jacobson in this issue in her article “Present at the Creation: The Founding and Formative Years of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries”). Oppenheimer's vision, drive, and tenacity—along with that of the individuals who became known as the “organizing committee”*—made the thing happen. The articles in the symposium tell many stories about the individuals who played such key roles in the formation of the organization. Similar stories are being played out even now as AAHSL moves its ambitious agenda into its second quarter century of existence. It is important for all of us to be very aware of those individual stories as we consider the role that our associations play in our lives—and the responsibility that we have to each other through them.

I have often thought there are certain key similarities between the condition of the academic health sciences library director and the hospital librarian running a one-person shop. The differences are numerous, of course, and I do not mean to minimize them, but academic library directors feel a peculiar sort of isolation that I imagine is akin to what solo librarians feel when faced with the next problem and the next decision. Academic library directors have professional colleagues at hand, of course, and solo librarians, by definition, do not, but directors are doing a job that is fundamentally unlike that of anyone else in their organizations, and, when directors need serious advice about a problem from “someone who has been there,” they have to look outside their organizations to find that person.

The members of AAHSL have always been keenly interested in the effective use of information technology (as documented in the article by Guard and Peay in this issue), and it was not long after I became a director that the AAHSL electronic discussion list was started. It was a lifesaver for me then and continues to be one of the most important tools in my professional life. MEDLIB-L serves the same function for many librarians, particularly the aforementioned solo librarians, and many specialized lists exist that enable us to reach out to our colleagues and to form friendships and professional bonds that would have been impossible to create a decade and a half ago. Fundamentally, that is what all of our professional associations do: they establish the communities where we can find people with similar problems and experiences, ideas, and expertise who help us to do the jobs that we have chosen to do.

But as useful as the discussion lists are, they are no substitute for getting together in person. Indeed, I find it interesting that I hear much less these days about the time when we will all be able to have our conferences “virtually” and not have to travel than I did ten years ago, when we were just beginning to use the new communications technologies. (Come to think of it, I haven't heard anyone predicting the “paperless office” lately, either.†) Just as we have come to realize that our physical libraries (at least in the academic setting) serve many more functions than as just a storehouse for materials and, thus, continue to be important places, even though people are accessing information from homes and offices and clinics, we have come to realize that our professional meetings are about much more than just sharing information.

One of the best conferences I have been to in recent years was last year's annual meeting of the Midcontinental Chapter of the Medical Library Association (MCMLA) in Topeka, Kansas. Lenora Kinzie and her crew‡ put on a wonderful meeting in what I think of as true MCMLA style. I admit that I have a soft spot for that group. Although I have been a member of the Southern Chapter for nearly eight years, MCMLA was the first chapter that I really became involved with, and I have not missed a meeting since 1987. (Some of you may know the story of my wedding to Lynn Fortney at the opening reception of the MCMLA meeting in Kansas City in 1995—now that's dedication.)

What I enjoy so much about the MCMLA meetings is that the organizers always seem to be very aware that the key component of the meeting is not getting speakers or presenting posters or papers—important as all of those things are. The most important thing is bringing the members together. MCMLA is one of the largest chapters geographically and one of the smallest in number of members. Many of the members work in very isolated settings. The annual chapter meeting is critical for many of them in that it may be the only chance they have during the year to sit and visit with colleagues and to talk about work, children, hobbies, and all of the different things that weave through their lives and help make up that sense of community.

I mentioned Lynn Fortney a moment ago. Currently in her third year on the MLA Board of Directors, she told me a while back that Carla J. Funk, CAE, MLA's executive director, had told the board members about a topic that has been much discussed among her colleagues in the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE). It is the concept of “stickiness,” and what I understand by that is the degree to which the members of a particular professional organization connect to one another, communicate with one another, help each other out, and feel part of a real community. MCMLA, it seems to me, is a particularly sticky chapter.

Any number of reasons exist for a greater or lesser degree of stickiness, and Funk and her colleagues spend considerable energy trying to figure out how they can engender a greater degree of stickiness in the organizations that they serve. I have observed, although I certainly do not have any data to prove it, that health sciences librarians tend to be stickier than our colleagues in other sectors of librarianship. I recall an AAHSL workshop that was held a number of years ago in Boston. The workshop was facilitated by Maureen Sullivan, with whom many of you have worked over the years. At that point in time, she had done relatively little work with health sciences groups but had done a great deal with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Perhaps sixty or seventy AAHSL directors were in the room, and, to get things started, she asked us to go around the room, introduce ourselves, and indicate the major leadership problem we were dealing with in our libraries. Two hours later, we finally got to the last row.

After the break, Sullivan told us that she had expected half an hour at most to get through the group. A group of ARL directors, she claimed, would not likely have been as open about problems in their libraries. Maybe the AAHSL directors just cannot resist a soapbox, but I think that the group has a particular quality of sharing and openness that is unique. And I see the same quality throughout MLA in the chapter meetings or section programs that I participate in. All in all, we are a sticky bunch.

One of the contributing factors to that closeness is that there are not that many of us. There are fewer than 150 academic health sciences library directors. MLA's annual meeting attendance hovers around 2,000. This number is not very large as professional associations go. We are able to get to know a very high percentage of our colleagues, in a variety of different settings.

In this situation, making the work of the associations happen requires a tremendous amount of effort by the members who are willing to volunteer their time and energy. Periodically, there is a little flare-up on MEDLIB-L over what I think of as the “who is MLA” issue. It usually starts when, in response to some issue or concern, someone posts a message that says, “Why doesn't MLA do X?” usually in a tone of exasperation that implies that the organization is chronically inattentive, unproductive, and, generally, useless. This comment will generally be followed by one or more individuals, with lesser or greater degrees of temperance, pointing out that “MLA is us,” and, if there is something that needs doing, it is up to the members to get it done.

I have been an active member of MLA for nearly twenty years, so by this time I usually know several members of the board of directors in any given year fairly well. Those I do not know personally, I usually know by reputation. The same goes for the various committee chairs and committee members. I know what is necessary to get things done. I can be as frustrated as anyone else with the amount of process required to move something through the organization from idea to committee to council to board and back again. It sometimes seems that it takes us forever to accomplish the least little thing. But this amount of time is the direct result of the fact that we insist on very democratic organizations. MLA, AAHSL, and the chapters, sections, and regional organizations that I am familiar with all go to extreme lengths to encourage involvement and participation and to try to ensure that all points of view have an opportunity to be expressed. This involvement and participation takes time—it takes calendar time just to move things through the process, but it also takes a tremendous amount of dedicated personal time from people who are willing to work evenings and weekends and squeeze in time for committee work during their already busy workdays.

Of course, even with all of those long dedicated hours, we do not accomplish everything that we would like to. This is simply the nature of volunteer organizations. And yet, when this fall I listened to the board representative at the chapter meetings talk about the nineteen or twenty significant programs or initiatives that MLA is undertaking this year or listened to the AAHSL officers describe the major programs that are currently ongoing in that organization, I find myself astonished at how much we actually do get done.

Our professional organizations make a fundamental difference in our ability to meet our professional goals. The best thing that they do is to provide a mechanism for us to come together, as individuals with a shared vision. When the hospital librarian in a rural setting in Wyoming and the new academic library director facing a first budget battle need help and comfort, need friends that they can talk to and get advice from, our associations provide the community that they can go to. We may be few, and we may sometimes feel isolated, particularly when the decisions we need to make are difficult, but we need never feel alone.