Questions and Answers

Last updated 25 January 2006

May I share your article(s) with my students or colleagues?

Please do! You needn’t ask permission.

May I quote from your articles?

Of course. You may freely quote passages—even extended passages—without asking permission. That’s fair use and we encourage it. (You may not quote an entire article without first receiving written permission. But quoting an entire article wouldn’t really be quoting, it would be publishing. Except in the case of translations, you cannot publish ALA material anywhere else. See our copyright page.)

The useful reader comments on Article X have disappeared. What happened?

Comments from the ALA 3.0 database have been saved (and links to relevant articles preserved) but have not been made public as we have not yet figured out how to map them to our new commenting system, which requires registration and login. When we solve these problems conceptually, we will happily resurrect the old comments. Until then, the old comments are unavailable. Hacking article URLs in hopes of finding old comments will not work.

Why does ALA use XHTML Transitional instead of Strict?

It’s our way of sticking it to The Man.

Liquid elastic layouts are the way of the righteous. Fixed-width layouts are for sinners. Your ALA 4.0 layout is fixed-width. Will you offer an alternative, liquid elastic layout?

No.

Have you taken your old articles offline?

Nearly all articles since 1998 are available. A few that never made it into the ALA 3.0 system did not make it into the ALA 4.0 system either, as nothing can come of nothing. Happily, we recently located nearly all the old files. As time permits, we will work them back into the system so you will be able to read them once again.

I wrote for the magazine but my bio does not appear in the Authors listings.

If you wrote an article long ago that did not make it into the database (see immediately above), then you also did not make it into the database. As we find time to rescue and restore old articles (see immediately above) we will restore your bio as well.

Can you help me solve a design/coding problem on my site?

Unfortunately, not. We get many email messages from folks who can’t solve a CSS or scripting or browser compatibility problem, or who’ve hit a snag while implementing a technique explained in an ALA article, or who seek other kinds of feedback on their projects. We wish we could help, but there aren’t enough hours in the day.

Will you review my product/site/book?

Probably not. With rare exceptions, we tend not to focus on specific commercial applications and publications. From time to time we will discuss products in relation to a key ALA theme: for instance, in Issue 143, we discussed then-new Flash MX in the context of authoring accessible rich media.

We will sometimes publish excerpts from relevant forthcoming books, but only when they are of great interest. For instance, Peter Morville is a father (with Lou Rosenfeld) of the modern information architecture field. In 2005, on the eve of its publication, we published an excerpt from his book, Ambient Findability.