I’ve learned a lot of things about ALA (my employer) dur­ing my first year work­ing there. Some­times it’s inter­est­ing and helps me under­stand why some­thing is the way it is. Other times my jaw drops because of an inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic (good and bad). I don’t think you could build an orga­ni­za­tion that works the way ALA does if you spent your life try­ing. I also hear about good, valu­able ser­vices we’re pro­vid­ing that are dif­fi­cult to pub­li­cize widely. In fact, there’s a lot going on at ALA that I think would be of inter­est that doesn’t fit into an “offi­cial” channel.

I’ve wanted to write about these things, but I didn’t want my per­sonal blog to turn into “all ALA, all the time.” Now, though, I have a place where I can do this, as I am a co-author of the new ALA Mar­gin­a­lia blog. It’s a place where a few of us can help explain the behe­moth that is ALA and com­ments are open so that any­one can ask ques­tions or give us feedback.

I’ve been ask­ing a lot of ques­tions inter­nally dur­ing my first year (my co-workers would prob­a­bly say annoy­ingly so), some of the same ques­tions I hear mem­bers and non-members ask­ing. This is going to be a forum where we can dis­cuss these things, so I encour­age you to join us there.

RSS feed is here (com­ments feed over here), and I think later today I’ll add an r-mail box so read­ers can get updates emailed to them. I think we’ve got all of the kinks worked out, but please us know if you run into any prob­lems with the blog.