Courier Services vs. USPS in ILL work

 I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about the use of contracted Courier Services in Interlibrary Loan work.  It's usually an annual membership and can be a potential money saver on postage expenses your institution would otherwise incur with USPS.  Combined with the Navigator (NRE) interface for ILL, it encourages in-state lending within Texas, Texans helping other Texans.  For the most part I have no major complaints with Trans-Amigos Express (TAE) that we utilize here.  Our service level gives us 5 days of delivery and pick-up and constitutes the bulk of our ILL business on a daily basis.  Where there have been issues have been with our partnership agreements with other library courier consortia like Kansas Library Express and the Missouri based MALA and MOBIUS consortia.  On the one hand, it's great to have access to their networks of library and we are happy to lend our materials to them in the heartland.  The problem crops up in the hand-off between them and TAE, which seems to cause sometimes intolerable delays to the point that mailing such items USPS would've been faster and less inconvenient....though with Postmaster DeJoy's apparent ongoing sabotage, who can say for sure.  The sooner that man is fired the better.  The governing board of USPS seems to finally slowly be acting in that direction and I'm eager to see DeJoy get the boot for a whole host of reasons, not just Library ILL work.

The pandemic for the most part has caused libraries to be more generous with each other in their loan terms, etc., and I'm heartened to see it.  I'm less than thrilled with lenders that don't take into account the courier-to-courier delays and refuse reasonable renewal requests to account for these delays that are out of either library's control.  We shouldn't punish each other or our patrons for something that was not our faults.   We can't directly fix the couriers, that's up to Amigos Library Services...but we can be more reasonable with each other, more generous, more accommodating.  Because that's what's best for the users.  Let's not break Ranganathan's 4th Law of Library Science if we can help it:

"Save the time of the reader".

Amen.

Renewing TLA and ALA memberships is bolstering public democratic institutions.

 In light of recent political events I felt strongly motivated to pony up and renew two long dormant professional memberships that I let expire because I didn't feel like they gave me much personal benefit.

In the current climate, it's about more than myself.  I renewed my membership both in the national American Library Association as well as my state-level Texas Library Association membership.  For reasons mainly personal, aesthetic and symbolic I also renewed my membership in the Progressive Librarians Guild that I was more active in when I was in library school in the early 2000s.  Yearly membership in PLG is cheap so tossing them a few bucks is no skin off my back.

No, where I really dug deeper is renewing those aforementioned ALA and TLA memberships and associated round-tables tailored to my current role in Inter-library Loan work.  I feel like it is important to bolster these civic institutions in a time of rising authoritarianism and outright white nationalist fascism on the American political right.  It's about more than myself and how these professional associations may or may not personally benefit my career aspirations.  I want them to remain strong advocates for intellectual freedom, the right to read, etc.  It's also because I lack imagination as to what else to do other than keep voting the way I do in every election (e.g. for Democratic Party candidates and against every Republican candidate).  But it was something I could do so I did it.  If you're still working in the library profession and have let your ALA and state-level library association membership lapse, maybe let the spirit of the season move you to generously revive your memberships and participation in these professional associations.  We need all hands on deck in the defense of small-d democracy and intellectual freedom and civil rights.