(Putting on LITA Board hat)

To pull out some math in case you don't want to sort through the docs, and
also make a correction:

Yes, LITA's membership decline is faster than average for ALA.

No, LITA is not the smallest division; ASCLA and United are quite a bit
smaller.

(Putting on personal hat)

I find myself thinking of LITA less as "the technology division of ALA" and
more as "the libtech association where I get to meet non-technology
librarians". I love getting to meet people I can talk Django and Heroku
with (!), and I meet more of those in code4lib than in ALA. But I *also* love
seeing how the tools of the libtech world do, and don't, support the needs
of library staff and patrons more broadly. And I love learning how the
issues that matter to us as technologists - copyright, data quality,
privacy - impact librarians in other subfields. And, to be blunt, there are
some damn fun youth services librarians, copyright librarians,
instructional librarians, et cetera. And I meet them through LITA.

(okay maybe that was my Board hat too. I can wear two hats at once! I am
like Hydra. Well. Not Project Hydra. Or Hail Hydra. SO YOU HOPE.)

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Cindi Blyberg <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> You can see the Executive Director's membership reports on ALA Connect:
>
> Annual 2014 - http://connect.ala.org/node/225631 (pdf)
> Midwinter 2014 - http://connect.ala.org/node/216881 (pdf)
> Annual 2013 - http://connect.ala.org/node/208000 (.docx)
> Midwinter 2013 - http://connect.ala.org/node/197812 (.rtf)
>
> -Cindi
> LITA Immediate Past President
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Kevin Ford <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > > I think this just goes to show, with the advent of the
> > > Internet, centralized authorities are not as necessary/useful
> > > as they once
> > > used to be. —ELM
> > >
> >
> > -- Maybe.  I think it it recession-related.  The high water mark for
> > nearly all of the groups on that list is 2007 (2006 for one or two). The
> > overall stats for ALA show the same membership pattern (increasing until
> > 2007, decreasing thereafter): http://www.ala.org/membership/
> > membershipstats_files/annual_memb_stats
> >
> > I'd be interested to know if LITA's membership decrease is greater (as a
> > percentage) than the others.  Perhaps that would suggest forums such as
> > code4lib peeled off some of those would-be LITA members.  Otherwise, it
> > just looks like a broader decline in ALA membership, probably for a few
> > reasons: fewer librarians in the workforce, fewer institutions willing to
> > pay professional membership fees, less willingness to pay those fees out
> of
> > pocket, etc.
> >
> > Yours,
> > Kevin
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 1/5/15 10:12 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> >
> >> I’m curious, how large is LITA (Library and Information Technology
> >>>> Association)? [0] How many members does it have?
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> Apparently it has around 3000 members this year. I found this on the
> ALA
> >>> membership statistics page:
> >>>
> >>> http://www.ala.org/membership/membershipstats_files/divisionstats#lita
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> Interesting and thank you. Code4Lib only needs fifty more subscribers to
> >> equal LITA’s size. I think this just goes to show, with the advent of
> the
> >> Internet, centralized authorities are not as necessary/useful as they
> once
> >> used to be. —ELM
> >>
> >>
>



-- 
Andromeda Yelton
Board of Directors, Library & Information Technology Association:
http://www.lita.org
Advisor, Ada Initiative: http://adainitiative.org
http://andromedayelton.com
@ThatAndromeda <http://twitter.com/ThatAndromeda>