Is the Canadian Library Association Still Viable?

The executive of the Canadian Library Association (CLA) - not to be confused with the Canadian Association of Law Libraries - has published a message to all CLA members on the association website that discusses the chronic budget deficits of Canada's national library association and the strategic changes that will be proposed at the CLA's next annual meeting in Edmonton in June in order to deal with the situation.

Discussing a recent executive meeting held in late February, the message states:

"We worked from the premise that the association’s finances should be spent on serving its members, specifically, on investing in the priorities and programs that fulfill the CLA mission to 'build the Canadian library and information community and advance its information professionals.' It was agreed that, for this year and forward, we must create a budget that both serves the best interests of the members and indicates that CLA is re-defining itself."

"It was further agreed that the main focus of CLA's activities should be to advocate for issues of cross-sectoral interest and national importance. In order to achieve this goal, we recognized that both the organizational structure and the budget need to be realigned to support the mission; maintaining the status quo is not an option. We need to build on our existing strengths, and concentrate our human and financial resources on those areas which CLA, as a national broad-based association, is uniquely positioned to advance."

Elections for Executive positions and Division Executive positions are postponed until a decision is taken regarding the organization’s structure. Regular association activities will continue as much as possible until June 30, 2010.

Many law librarians are members of either the CACUL (university libraries) division or of the CASLIS (special libraries and information services) division of CLA.