AL Direct
So, I’ve been getting these really irritating, poorly-formatted, super-big-font e-mails entitled "AL Direct." I thought I was the only one who was annoyed by them, but apparently they’ve gotten under Jessamyn West’s skin too. Like Jessamyn, I immediately looked up the FAQ on AL Direct to try to figure out what the heck this is. The first sentence of the FAQ states:
AL Direct (American Libraries Direct) is an electronic newsletter sent to ALA personal members by e-mail as a perquisite of membership.
Okay, so after I looked up "perquisite" (I thought they’d misspelled prerequisite, but it turns out it means "freebie" or "bonus"), I thought–gee, who uses the word "perquisite"? Did a Civil War veteran write this?
Also, is this really a perk? The newsletter doesn’t include any actual content, it just includes links to content that’s already online in one form or another (sometimes some irritatingly huge PDFs). Jessamyn also noticed that the newsletter includes web bugs (nasty little identity trackers).
ALA gets a big fat F from the LiB on ALA Direct.
January 20th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
I registered my skepticism on the Council list, as well, though I’ll withhold judgment until I talk to Leonard Kniffel about it. Still, your comment about the quaintness of the language brought a chuckle.
January 23rd, 2006 at 12:41 pm
The ACRL blog also has some commentary about AL Direct. I become more and more satisfied that I don’t have an ALA membership…
January 23rd, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Hmm…I found it irritating to get it too. I don’t like it because I never opted in to get it in my email, and I didn’t even see a quick way to opt out.
It showed up unasked for one day, even though I try to be careful about using my real email address only for real people – and shunt lists over to an email account I set up for lists.
Bleck.
January 23rd, 2006 at 6:37 pm
You can opt out–there is an “unsubscribe” option in the message. Use CTRL + F to find it (you’ll be hard pressed to find it by scanning). All around a nasty little piece of “perquisite.”
January 24th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
They told us in Council on Sunday that the response had been really really positive, so people who are unsubscribing, make sure you drop a (pleasant) note to American Libraries and tell them that you’re not really psyched about it.