Surviving Annual, Returning Safely
ALA/CLA Annual Conference in Toronto,
June 19–25, 2003
Table of Contents
You’ve been licking those hospital doorknobs again,” joked Margaret Atwood, when emcee Jo Ann Pinder apologized for alarming everyone with a brief coughing fit at the mike during a question-and-answer session with the popular Canadian author. Atwood’s quip was one of many bits of black humor that pervaded a conference nearly doomed by rampant preconference alarm over the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome that cursed Toronto in April and May.
Indeed, once in the host city for the ALA Annual Conference, attendees found that hospital-doorknob licking seemed to be what it would take to catch SARS. They did not find a city under siege; they did not find a terrified population walking around in surgical masks. What they found instead was a city bustling with entertainment and nightlife, hotels eager to please, a conference venue that lent a unique international aura to programs and proceedings, and a sense of triumph in those who’d braved the trip despite bad media hype compounded by budget cuts and employer restrictions on international travel.
That the American and Canadian Library Associations’ joint Annual Conference in Toronto, June 19–25, happened at all might be considered a miracle. That it brought 17,570 librarians and library supporters to a city whose tourism industry has been devastated by SARS is what association officials call the triumph of information over hysteria. Nevertheless, attendance was nearly one-third lower than the projections of 25,000 made before SARS threatened to force cancellation of the first joint ALA/CLA conference in 43 years.
A number of institutions discouraged staff from attending the conference. At Eastern Michigan University, for example, the health services department told staff that if they chose to attend they were required to go into voluntary quarantine for 10 days after returning. At Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, staff members were advised not to go and were asked to sign a waiver absolving the university of responsibility for illness incurred. The Library of Congress pulled out of the exhibit hall because exhibit staffers were reluctant to attend. Nonexhibit LC staff who chose to attend were given detailed instructions in how to monitor their health during and after the trip, including daily temperature-taking. In the end, 210 exhibitors canceled; 569 showed up.
“The only place where people are wearing masks is on CNN,” said Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman at the opening general session. “On behalf of Toronto’s two-and-a-half-million SARS-free residents, thank you for being educated instead of afraid.”
Canadian author and broadcaster Rex Murphy said American conference delegates should be congratulated for coming to Toronto in light of the SARS scare. “Half of the scare is the word,” Murphy quipped at the CLA President’s Program.
Unfazed by the SARS outbreak, other speakers including U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and journalist Naomi Klein addressed issues key to the library profession—among them threats to privacy posed by the USA Patriot Act, which Sanders characterized as “an extremely dangerous piece of legislation that strikes at the heart of what freedom is all about.” Klein called librarians “beacons of sanity in an increasingly insane world,” and Nader said librarians must fight the current wave of funding cuts. “Once the libraries go, there goes democracy,” Atwood observed.
In the first of three free events in the Auditorium Speaker Series, an enthusiastic crowd got a pep talk from Ms. magazine cofounder Gloria Steinem, who named the male librarians in attendance honorary women. Steinem criticized the Bush administration’s effort to protect the Iraqi oil ministry and not libraries and museums during the recent war, calling the breach “a great metaphor” for what the president’s policies are doing “to gut the educational system and the libraries in the United States.”
Conference spirits were dampened less by SARS than by the news that the Supreme Court had ruled June 23 against ALA in its challenge to the Children’s Internet Protection Act. The Association immediately issued a press release denouncing the decision and stating that the court “did not fully understand the difference between adults and children using library resources.”
Some American attendees—taking advantage of a June Ontario Court of Appeals ruling that extended marriage rights to same-sex couples—went to city hall and tied the knot, then celebrated at a reception sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. Among the newly married were Tanner Wray and Karl Debus-López, both of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Partners for 19 years, they said they did it because they wanted “legal recognition, even if it is restricted to Canada.”
The more than 2,000 programs and meetings that made up the conference were tracked by general themes: administration; children and young adults; electronic and digital information; issues and updates; literature, cultural heritage, and public programming; staff development, recruitment, and education; technical services and collection management; and user services and outreach. Despite speaker cancellations and a lack of a quorum for some business meetings, most programs enjoyed solid attendance, which totaled only about 3,400 less than last year’s conference in Atlanta.
Although SARS apparently had nothing to do with the cancellation of the annual Scholarship Bash, it was a big disappointment to many that the concert by Three Mo’ Tenors fell through. According to ALA Conference Services, the management company for the popular operatic trio is in receivership and could not guarantee the appearance of the guest artists.
Counteracting the cancellation, ProQuest donated $50,000 to the Spectrum Scholarship Initiative and hosted a luncheon for Spectrum scholars. The Bash has raised more than $350,000 over the last four years. Ticket holders have the option of making their $25 ticket a tax-deductible donation to ALA scholarships or receiving a refund. Visit www.ala.org/annual/ by August 22 for more information.
“If not for the economy and SARS, this would have been the biggest conference of the century,” ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels said at a meeting of the Exhibits Round Table, noting instead a “special joie de vivre and camaraderie among attendees.” Moving to another site would have produced a less-successful conference than this one, he explained.
Fiels also cleared up rumors that Canadian officials had offered ALA $1.8 million to keep the conference in Toronto. Reductions in costs in virtually every area were negotiated, he said, but there was no cash settlement.
Conference Services Director Deidre Ross announced that hotel costs would be down by about 12% because of tax breaks and refunds. She also noted that prepaid booth rentals for exhibitors who canceled would be applied to next year’s conference but that no-shows lost a point in their seniority ranking for space preferences.
Most exhibitors seemed to agree that traffic was good. Dynix CEO Jack Blount observed that a lot of “decision-makers” seemed to have come to Toronto. “We’ve had a great show,” he said, with more sales leads to follow up on than at any other show he could remember.
Discussion, debate
The first conferencewide discussion series, “One Book, One Conference,” was so successful that ALA’s Public Programs Office is considering hosting a second series in 2004.Three hundred attendees participated in six sessions—each led by a U.S. or Canadian librarian—that explored themes in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale and “offered a model for community adult programming and called attention to Atwood’s subsequent presentation,” noted Margaret Clark, director of adult program services at Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library.
Public Programs also sponsored appearances by 18 authors and poets from across the country on the “Live! @ your library” reading stage in the exhibit hall.
ALA’s highest honor went to three people this year. At the opening general session, Honorary Membership was bestowed on Barbara Gittings, Samuel Morrison, and Lucille Thomas. Longtime gay activist Gittings was honored as the principal force behind the growth of the ALA Gay Task Force (now the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table) and for “the development of programs to highlight the availability of gay materials for use in libraries.” Thomas was honored for her contributions as a librarian, educator, and library trustee; for her leadership role at the local, state, national, and international levels; and for her contributions to the education of children and adults. Morrison was recognized for his promotion of library services, his vision in establishing landmark partnerships between libraries and other community organizations, and his commitment as a mentor to developing the next generation of librarians. (A complete rundown of ALA awards is scheduled for the September issue of AL.)
Responding to widespread criticism of ALA’s redesigned website, Council passed resolutions to ensure that ALA membership has an active role in the site’s design and organization and that documents made unavailable by the website migration be maintained in an electronic archive. Immediate Past President John W. Berry noted that the controversy over the website “blindsided” the Executive Board. Treasurer Liz Bishoff observed that it raises the larger issue of a lack of system-development methodology at ALA.
Strong interest from Canadian conferees helped push store sales above $89,000 (U.S. dollars). Nearly 1,400 customers in four-and-a-half days enjoyed a first look at new digital art-resource CDs from ALA Graphics, including “One Book One Community,” and a sneak peak at the forthcoming Library Art CD. Bestsellers included a new poster from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic-novel series and the world premiere of the Dewey Decimal coffee mug, which will be available in the fall catalog. ALA Editions enjoyed brisk sales of both new and backlist titles, notably Creating Policies for Results by Sandra Nelson and June Garcia, and Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians by Priscilla Caplan. American Libraries columnist Walt Crawford dropped by to sign copies of his new book, First Have Something to Say: Writing for the Library Profession. The store also featured souvenir items from the Toronto Public Library.
A well-located silent auction of items donated by vendors raised close to $13,000 for scholarships, falling a bit short of last year’s $19,000, announced Kelly Bullock, president of K&K Administrative Solutions, at the Exhibits Round Table meeting, and donations were down by about $10,000 “for obvious reasons,” she said, although some companies that did donate did not attend.
Friends of Libraries USA’s popular “First Author, First Book” program again gave attendees the chance to discover new authors—this year, Gretchen Moran Laskas, Christopher Castellani, Tess Uriza Holthe, and Edeet Ravel. Castellani said writing enabled him to preserve history by telling his parents’ stories—stories that “for a brief moment will be in a bookstore, but will always be in a library.”
At a festive inaugural banquet in the historic Royal York Hotel (where Queen Elizabeth II stays when in Toronto), 2002–2003 ALA President Maurice Freedman passed the gavel to Carla Hayden, who committed her 2003–2004 presidency to equity of access for all library users. Hayden and Vice President/President-elect Carol Brey-Casiano also hosted a dessert reception at the hotel.
In her parting comments, ALA Treasurer Liz Bishoff warned of belt-tightening ahead, saying, “ALA can no longer afford to say yes to every great idea, let alone every good idea. . . . For every new activity, an old one has to go.” Bishoff turned the treasury over to Teri Switzer of the Auraria Library in Denver, who was elected this spring to fill the remaining year in the term vacated by Bishoff’s resignation.
At this international conference, Council dealt with two resolutions focusing on foreign concerns: One, condemning the loss of cultural resources following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, passed readily; the other, dealing with various aspects of information policy in the U.S. and Cuba, which had been the subject of media attention even before the conference began, was referred back to committee for further work.
Another prominent issue facing ALA leadership was whether ALA should add socially responsible investments to its investment policy. After much discussion by the Executive Board and a briefer, time-truncated debate in Council, the matter wound up being returned to the board’s Finance and Audit Committee for further study.
The Intellectual Freedom Committee held a hearing on privacy issues in libraries, as part of the development of guidelines for creating privacy policies. The completed guidelines were expected to be released soon after the conference.
It’s back to the drawing board for those working to lure a larger crowd to Membership Meetings. A recent bylaw measure reduced the required quorum from 1% to one-half of 1%, but the change failed to produce enough bodies to conduct official business at both scheduled sessions.
What follows are reports on key programs and selected sessions that offer a glimpse into the plethora of learning and networking opportunities at the historic, if challenging, meeting of library folks from both sides of the border. It was an “artistic success” if not a financial one, said Ross. As Past President Berry quipped, “We shouldn’t wait another 40 years to do this!”
Sanders Seeks Library Liberties
As chief sponsor and author of the Freedom to Read Protection Act of 2003 (H.R. 1157), opening session speaker Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was well known to attendees familiar with the library-related provisions of the USA Patriot Act. Although he had voted against the legislation in 2001, Sanders credited the Vermont Library Association with educating him on how bad it really was.
“Many of us are working hard to amend the USA Patriot Act,” he said, “because we do not want to see a slow but sure chilling impact on intellectual curiosity.” Adding that “127 cities and towns have already passed resolutions expressing concerns” about the act, Sanders emphasized that these were not just liberals from Vermont: Commissioners in Republican Blount County, Tennessee, “recently adopted a lengthy resolution declaring the Patriot Act an unconstitutional infringement on God-given rights and liberties.”
Sanders agreed that Americans should protect themselves against terrorism, but not at the expense of hard-earned freedoms. Noting that the Patriot Act overrides state privacy laws and allows the FBI to obtain search warrants without probable cause, Sanders said: “I agree with librarians and bookstore owners all across this country that we should not be giving the government the power to go on a fishing expedition by sifting through borrowing or purchasing records, with such low standards of evidence and in secret court proceedings. That is not what American democracy is about.”
The bill that Sanders sponsored exempts libraries and bookstores from the lowered legal requirements of the Patriot Act. He said it also requires the government to “provide detailed reports to Congress so we can keep track of how governmental agencies are using their newly expanded powers.”
Quoting Justice Department spokeman Mark Corallo’s remark, “We are only going after the bad guys,” Sanders warned that “President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft should not be in the position of arbitrarily determining who is a bad guy.”
Atwood’s Insights Enthrall SRO Crowd
While her novel The Handmaid’s Tale was the talk of the conference, Canadian author Margaret Atwood enthralled an audience of over 1,000 at the Public Library Association’s President’s Program, which marked the culmination of the “One Conference, One Book” reading and discussion program.
The author of more than 25 books talked about her latest “peculiar” effort, Oryx and Crake (Doubleday), and recalled her earliest experiences in libraries and the restrictions placed on her reading as a young adult. For some reason, she joked, Edgar Allan Poe was “considered appropriate” just because there was no sex in it. “I’ve been a bit warped ever since.”
PLA President Jo Ann Pinder asked Atwood to describe how publishing has changed since she began writing. The author described how she worked with a flatbed press and linoleum blocks to produce her first book in the 1960s. She noted that there was then no significant market for Canadian books, and the wealth of festivals, readings, and other venues for writers did not yet exist.
Illuminating the “One Conference, One Book” discussion, she said The Handmaid’s Tale “is not a feminist tract; it’s about totalitarianism from a woman’s point of view.” Denying charges that the book is “anti-Christian,” she noted, “It’s about religion being used to control populations.”
Asked what her biggest writing challenges are, Atwood talked about two books she put a great deal of effort into but abandoned before they were completed “because they didn’t work. I started writing, and nothing happened,” she said. “The books were going to be very long and very boring.”
How do libraries and librarians figure into her work? “What would I do without them?” she replied, explaining the extensive research that went into her book of poems The Journals of Susanna Moodie, which was based on the life of the Canadian pioneer.
The program was sponsored by Ingram Library Services.
Klein: Our World Is Not for Sale
“The fact is, you have chosen a profession that has become radical,” Canadian anti-globalization activist and columnist Naomi Klein told the crowded auditorium at the conference closing session. “Being a librarian today means being a guardian of the embattled values of knowledge, public space, and sharing that animate your profession.”
Klein’s spirited comments proved she knew nearly as much about library issues as the menace of privatization, an insight rewarded by frequent applause. “Most of you probably didn’t think that helping people to share books was subversive when you decided to become librarians,” she said. But the essence of “free trade” is to make sure that “absolutely nothing—whether books or water or ideas—is offered for free.”
After pointing out several attempts by corporations to privatize natural resources—the water supply by Bechtel in Bolivia, rice and cotton seeds by Monsanto in India—Klein warned that library services were not far behind, thanks to the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade and Services.
“Under GATS, private research providers, bookstores, and video store chains could go to trade court and argue that they are being discriminated against because they don’t get public subsidies and you do,” she argued. “Trust me on this: Barnes and Noble is not your friend, even if they do hand out cool tote bags. And the big publishers may be wining and dining you this week, but that doesn’t mean they won’t sue you in trade court for offering electronic books and journals for free.”
Klein said libraries have to fight back by getting users on their side and providing “a presence in people’s lives that goes beyond anything offered by the market. . . . A marketing concept will never be able to replicate the passion that flows from an institution that is truly an outgrowth of the people it serves.”
Another tactic, she said, is to resist the urge to partially privatize through outsourcing or partnering arrangements, which could be used as a wedge to full privatization later: “It’s already happening with water, health care, sewers, and energy. Why, when information is so profitable, would libraries be immune?”
Nader: Commercialism Diminishes Everyone
Television is 90% advertising and tawdry entertainment, said Ralph Nader. “The public airways do not belong to the public,” the consumer activist told a capacity crowd in the 1,300-seat convention center auditorium during the President’s Program, presented by outgoing ALA President Maurice Freedman.
“Try to get a library story on the evening news,” Nader challenged. “You have to sack it, not use it!”
Nader has had plenty of experience with the media in recent months trying to draw their attention to the plight of the District of Columbia Public Library, where he has organized the D.C. Library Renaissance Project.
Library budgets have to become “power budgets” by rallying public support, he said, observing that many American public and school libraries face budget cuts of 15% or more. And don’t plead in “that forlorn tone of a beleaguered librarian,” he urged.
Nader’s speech moved quickly to national politics. “When the Bushes and the Cheneys talk about the most powerful country in the world, they are talking about military power, not humanitarian power, certainly not library power.”
The financial plight of libraries is part of a broader attack on community, Nader said, and comes at a time when half of U.S. government expenditures will be military. He denounced the “corporate crime wave,” the commercialization of our society, and the “corporate takeover of budget priorities” in the public sector.
“Corporate welfare towers over poverty welfare,” Nader said, demanding to know how President Bush was going to spend the $26,000 he’ll receive from his own tax cut. “He ought to give the money to the District of Columbia Public Library. That would make Laura Bush happy.” He then noted that Mrs. Bush has helped pursuade her husband to increase federal funding for libraries from $112 million to $285 million, but much of this money is earmarked for training new librarians, “who are going to find themselves looking for jobs in crumbling libraries or looking for jobs that aren’t there.”
And if a library system is on the upswing? It’s because there are “enough people in the community who say it’s going to be done,” Nader opined. Reviving libraries, especially in our cities, represents “educational renewal, civic renewal, and urban renewal, all in one.”
He cited the testimony of a 12-year-old girl who told the D.C. city council that she was grateful for the opportunity to speak before the group (AL, May, p. 8) because it was the first time she had ever done anything for her country: “She was redefining patriotism: Do something for your country: Read!”
Nader said he was troubled by the misguided notion that libraries have been rendered unnecessary by the Internet. “If any of you know of an Internet program that has reduced illiteracy, let me know.” The great success of technology, he said, is that it has permitted the participation of people with disabilities.
Ironically, Nader’s speech was sponsored by Dynix, and several company representatives were seated in the front row. Dynix Senior Vice President of Marketing Mark Hawkins, told AL, however, that the speech struck most of them as an if-the-shoe-fits-wear-it situation. “American business has been guilty of many of the things Ralph Nader says, and we agree with him that corporate misconduct is totally unacceptable. However, you want to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he cautioned. “Our country is built on corporations that build a tax base and lead to great things like libraries.”
Dynix is an ALA Library Champion, one of 38 corporate members of the Association that pay the top level of dues—at least $5,000 annually—over 90% of which goes to advocacy.
Feminism and Music Mark Speaker Series
“I feel more connected to the profession of librarianship than my own as a journalist,” claimed feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem, who addressed conferees in the first event in the Auditorium Speaker Series.
“This is the profession that rescued me,” the Ms. magazine cofounder said, explaining that she read her way through the collection at her local library in Toledo, Ohio, at the rate of three books a week until the age of 12, when her gypsy parents enrolled her in a formal education system.
Steinem described librarians as being intimately connected with the democratization of knowledge as champions of intellectual freedom. She added that her recognition of the importance of libraries and librarians was reinforced when ultra-right conservatives waged a censorship battle to pull Ms. from library shelves.
To loud applause, Steinem pledged her support for efforts to fight certain provisions of the USA Patriot Act “for those of you who have the misfortunate of living across the border with the Bush administration.” She also acknowledged the efforts against the Children’s Internet Protection Act which, she asserted, “does nothing to protect children and a lot to limit political and national information. It seems to me that if the same standards were used to rent books as is being used to filter information on the Internet, then the bookshelves would be practically empty.”
She engaged the audience with a number of items that she described as “what I would not know, if not for libraries” as evidence of the many roles that libraries play in providing alternative news. “We must know our history to make progress—the other 95% of our history—not just what supports what’s going on now,” Steinem maintained. “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
“Songs and Stories from Clyde Edgerton and the Rank Strangers Band” was the title of the second Auditorium Speaker Series program. Offering a healthy dose of American music and some of the down-home wisdom that inspires his writing (“If I’d known I was going to live so long, I’d have bought a new mattress”), Edgerton performed with his band and read from his forthcoming novel, Lunch at the Piccadilly (Algonquin, September 2003).
Librarians as Saviors
Canadians Rex Murphy, author and broadcaster, and Janice Gross Stein, expert on public policy and international issues, cohosted Wendy Newman’s CLA President’s Program with a mixture of humor, religion, and affirmation of the profession of librarianship.
“Libraries are a form of communion—a place of reverence to be respected for its potential to touch the essence of what it is to be human,” Murphy contended. “Every book is a library—a shelter, a depository of words, a library of words with a high pitch.” When books come in contact with one another, he asserted, they are “instinctively in heat” and “collide and jostle” as they are mediated through and processed by the reader.
According to Murphy, words are the meeting of the human intellect and spirit. “Libraries and librarians are custodians of ‘the word,’” he maintained, while interjecting spirituality in this message, taken from the first two lines of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word. And the word was God.”
“Let us pause to praise the dust on the shelves; speed is not always desirable. As custodians of the word in its physical form, we should understand the permanence of what we do,” Murphy suggested.
Stein discussed libraries as public institutions, indicating that people come to libraries “because they are crucial to the construction of civic space.”
“Libraries are the fundamental building block to a vibrant democracy, and if we shortchange our libraries, we limit our capacity to deepen and enrich our democratic societies,” she stressed. “Libraries are the most important egalitarian path to education and are the fundamental arena for social justices in our society.”
“Libraries are becoming more than houses of texts; libraries are the spaces of lifelong learning,” Stein said, adding that librarians are not only custodians of the word, as Murphy indicated, but are also “custodians of the quality of our society, by providing a means for people to educate themselves.”
Librarians, according to Stein, are “interpreters of knowledge” and “saviors” because people come to them for what they know and to help them trace paths. “Collectively,” Stein told the crowd, “libraries are a public good, a resource we all depend on.”
New ALA Website Gets Some First Aid
The April 7 launch of ALA’s retooled website produced a torrent of criticism for its poor usability and only a trickle of praise for its new look, despite the two years of staff and member input that went into vendor selection and design. Many complaints centered on the long and unwieldy URLs, poor search-engine performance, missing content, and the lack of automatic redirects from old site addresses.
After a preliminary meeting June 7 at ALA headquarters in Chicago to identify the problems and prioritize solutions, the Web Advisory Committee got together again with ALA technical staff in Toronto to find out what progress had been made.
ALA Manager of Web Development Debi Lewis had some good news about the site:
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Active Matter, ALA’s web-content vendor, has agreed to rewrite its software to allow shorter web addresses. Existing URLs and internal links to them will be truncated automatically, although staff will have more control over what the address looks like. Lewis said there would be some additional costs involved, but Active Matter agreed to do some of the work for free, since “it will result in good changes to its base product.” The vendor hopes to have the fixes in by September 1.
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Improvements in the speed and accuracy of the search engine were expected to be in place by July 14. Lewis said that the fix would not result in additional costs. Active Matter will also work with ALA staff to come up with more varied and customizable relevance rankings.
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Users linking to pages on ALA’s old site will be directed to an error page that allows them to search the new site for the content or visit the old site for an archived version. (This improved error page was actually added July 3.)
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ALA agreed to create by July 17 an improved, standardized feedback form to use for comments on the site.
Although committee members were generally pleased with the progress report, some expressed reservations about adding new, expensive modules, such as an event manager and online membership registration. As former “Internet Librarian” columnist forAL Karen Schneider put it, “Are we taking on too much all at once before we’ve completely fixed what’s bad?”
ALA Council approved two resolutions from the Web Advisory Committee that called for more member participation in enhancements to the website and access to documents that were not transferred from the old site.
Finances Assessed at Info Session
ALA policy dictates that Council and the Executive Board hold an information session for membership separate from Council’s three formal meetings. Ostensibly to allow member input into the activities of the Association’s leadership, the meetings are generally attended, as was the Toronto session, by councilors and board members and a smattering of the rank-and-file.
Finances took center stage as Budget Analysis and Review Committee chair Patricia Smith revealed that revenue in ALA’s FY 2003 budget is expected to be $3.3 million below projections. There are losses everywhere, she said, with the exception of membership, but cost containment, reductions in travel, and a hiring freeze are expected to mean that there will be no deficit when the fiscal year closes at the end of this month.
“The money is not there to support all that we want to do,” said Smith, but she also said the FY 2004 budget, while “conservative,” does not eliminate any programs.
Endowment Trustee Rick Schwieterman reported that ALA’s investment portfolio is “positioned to perform favorably,” with a $12-million balance, “$15 million Canadian,” he joked.
Schwieterman praised a donation from the family of Katherine Schneider of Wisconsin, which has permitted the establishment of a $300,000 endowment that will provide three $5,000 awards each year for books about children or adolescents with disabilities.
Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels reported on progress toward implementing ALA Council’s open electronic meeting resolution. He then spent considerable time explaining how objections to the design and functionality of the new ALA website will be addressed. Acknowledging that better communication with membership during the planning stages would have been useful, he promised better tracking of the improvements that will be made. Fiels also announced that staffer Debi Lewis, liaison with Active Matter during the firm’s creation of the new site, was being officially made point person to respond to member concerns that someone be “in charge.”
URLs will be brought to a length that can be embossed on a pencil, Fiels promised, saying that an implementation plan with guidelines was being formulated following a meeting of the Web Advisory Committee in Chicago two weeks before the Toronto conference.
President Maurice Freedman thanked everyone who supported his presidency and better-salaries initiative. “Wherever I’ve gone,” he said, “I’ve found that librarians and people who work in libraries are paid less than those in male-dominated professions. It’s a global issue.”
Planning Assembly Tackles CE, Advocacy
The Planning and Budget Assembly meets to give ALA members a stronger voice in the business of running the Association; 74 representatives from divisions, committees, round tables, and Council are assigned to it. This year’s assembly drew only about 25 members who, along with about a dozen ALA staff members, reviewed an advocacy business plan presented by Associate Executive Director for Communications and Marketing Gerald Hodges, and an overview of continuing education at ALA presented by Senior Associate Executive Director for Member Programs and Services Mary Ghikas.
Hodges announced a new working partnership with Friends of Libraries USA. “We need the Friends,” he said, noting that ALA has been unable to reach these important advocates in sufficient numbers. He noted that an important component of advocacy is giving local communities the support and resources they need to pass library bond issues.
Ghikas presented a historical overview of ALA’s continuing-education efforts and led the group into small breakout sessions for discussion, gathering input on three questions: 1) How do we achieve our CE goals without causing a new level of bureaucracy? 2) How can we reach the 90% of members who do not attend conferences? 3) How do we more effectively partner with, or market our expertise to, local and regional groups?
Nancy Bolt, former ALA Executive Board member and state librarian of Colorado, asked why it’s so critical that ALA provide more continuing education when there is no dearth of it available to librarians across the country. Ghikas noted that “everybody at ALA already does it; this is about doing it better.”
ALA Treasurer Liz Bishoff advised the group that FY 2004, which begins September 1, would be a difficult year for Association finances, which are already stretched to the maximum.
Councilor Sarah Pritchard raised the issue of the operating agreement between the Association and its divisions, noting that it contains many “disincentives to cooperation,” but Bishoff said the agreement was serving well.
Membership Meetings Flop Again
A just-approved bylaw measure that reduced the quorum for Membership Meetings from 1% to one-half of 1% (AL, June/July, p. 9) failed to produce the required number at the two scheduled sessions. ALA President Maurice Freedman declared that there was no quorum and thus no official business could be conducted.
Approximately 130 people attended Membership I, where American Association of School Librarians members Erlene Bishop Killeen and Cyndi Phillips had planned to introduce a resolution on the growing reduction of school libraries and media centers. According to Killeen, at least eight studies reveal that the librarian and school library media center program is the number-one link to student achievement. She expressed “extreme alarm” because of the recent recruitment push for new librarians in this field and now their jobs are in danger.
“School libraries need to have their budgets tripled, quadrupled—whatever it takes,” said Councilor James Casey, who suggested an aggressive approach to tackling this issue. Public Library Association Councilor Christine Hage suggested that a mechanism should be devised for individual libraries to contact ALA directly when they see elimination of school librarians and libraries.
“We need to know the history of how school libraries came into being in the late ’60s with federal funding and how it was an institution under the auspices of local control of the block grants to the states,” said to school librarian Richard Moore of Orange County, California.
Other topics included the ALA website, which George Porter said is “severely compromised, if not totally broken.”
With 80 members in attendance, Membership II was slightly delayed as details of the Supreme Court decision on the Children’s Internet Protection Act hushed the entire conference. President-elect Carla Hayden chaired the meeting for Freedman.
“ALA absolutely must go to the mat for adults to have open access to computers in libraries,” said Councilor Karen Schneider, reacting initially to early reports about the CIPA decision from Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
In other discussions, Committee on Organization chair James Rettig said the committee is continuing its work on e-members and electronic committee meetings.
“The issue here is whether we want to make this electronic forum a substitute for traditional face-to-face meetings or an enhancement so that members can get more out of the meeting,” said Councilor Ling Hwey Jeng.
Political Savvy 101
At the Library Administration and Management Association’s standing-room-only program “What They Didn’t Teach You in Library School: How to Be Politically Savvy,” speaker Ken Haycock joked that, as a professor at the University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies, he had “considerable difficulty with the title of the program,” although he admitted it’s impossible to teach everything in just two years. “People treat graduate education in librarianship like chickenpox: Limited early exposure gives lifetime immunity,” he quipped.
Haycock noted that public relations and advocacy, while important, do not equal political savvy. “We can do bookmarks up the yin-yang, but if you think that’s going to make a difference in the approach people take to the quality of service you provide and the funding you get, you’re wrong,” he said.
Anne Turner, director of the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Public Libraries, agreed that librarians need to change the way they promote the value of their services: “It’s crucial to stop talking about story hours for kids and start talking about literacy promotion and school readiness.” It’s also necessary to understand who your real target is, frame messages to reach that audience, and always be prepared with ideas on how to implement what you want, she said, noting that being politically savvy has to be a collaborative effort with the library’s Friends and board of trustees.
“I would argue that we are talking about marketing when we talk about political savvy,” said James Neal, vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University, suggesting that ideas such as consumer behavior, branding, and customization “increasingly touch upon the work we do in all types of libraries.”
As “bell ringers for the public interest,” librarians need to think about acting strategically every day, Neal said, adding that it’s crucial to “know what position you’re willing to back up to. . . . We are outweighed and outnumbered tremendously, so the compromise process is critical.”
What to Do When the FBI Calls
The FBI provided its own take on the USA Patriot Act at the ALA Washington Office’s legislative briefing. On hand to answer a barrage of audience questions was Charles Rosenberg, counsel to FBI Director Robert Mueller and a former federal prosecutor.
When asked by Freedom to Read Foundation board member Herb Foerstel about the infamous “gag order” that forbids librarians from talking about terrorism inquiries at their libraries, Rosenberg replied that the intent was to protect an individual’s privacy: “Gag order provisions are not unique to national security investigations. Grand jury proceedings are secret in perpetuity. Certain court orders issued to a bank in a financial inquiry may not be disclosed to customers. The gag order is not so much an attempt to gag librarians as to protect the recipient of an investigation.”
Tim Richards, director of the University of Michigan at Dearborn library, asked how a library could best respond in a nightmarish hypothetical scenario in which a deputy sheriff shows up at night and demands a Patriot Act consent search for patron records from an 18-year-old student assistant.
Rosenberg stressed that all staff should know what procedures to follow when the police come knocking. “I absolutely agree that it can be intimidating,” he said. “If agents are rude or obstreperous, you have every right to complain.” In cases where no FBI agents are present, the library should check to make sure the officers are part of one of the 66 joint terrorism task forces that the FBI has set up and “notify the FBI office of any problems with the JTTF.” He also warned that law enforcement has “no requirement to come in with a subpoena, but they must get one if you ask.”
Caroline Good of Cincinnati asked what police would do with any unrelated information they found on a library computer. Information, such as child pornography, “unrelated to the subject of the search warrant can be pursued if it is meritorious,” Rosenberg said. “But we need predication to open a case. Reading lists are not predication. The FBI has no interest in what your patrons are reading, particularly after 9/11 when more people are reading books about the Middle East.”
Forging a Career without an MLS
Diane Fay, 2003–2004 Library Support Staff Interests Round Table president, said she urged all support staff who worked for her at the Boston Public Library to go to library school, although “that’s not the option for everyone, and it wasn’t the option for me,” she admitted. Fay kicked off LSSIRT’s program, “An MLS Is One, but Are There Other Options?” by describing her own 34-year career in libraries—from an entry-level position to her retirement in 2002 as BPL’s highest-paid library assistant—proving that an MLS is not the only route to advancement.
Karen Melville, director of the Professional Learning Center at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information Studies, said many support staff have succeeded because they “found a niche,” although one problem with that approach is “you often can’t move with it.”
Her advice? Take advantage of in-house opportunities. Be proactive and find out what’s available. Join organizations, both for networking and because it’s empowering.
Take continuing-education classes, and seek out training in areas that aren’t usually covered by librarians. If necessary, move to a smaller organization, “where you can wear more hats.” But the best opportunity is to take advantage of the emerging job market: “Wherever there aren’t boundaries, there are opportunities,” Melville said.
Thomas Abbott, dean of libraries and instructional support at the University of Maine at Augusta, discussed his school’s bachelor, associate, and certificate programs, which are offered online and draw approximately 450 students each semester. While such degrees are increasingly recognized by employers and help some workers get raises, he said, “we still hear from detractors who say we are creating dime-store librarians.”
Improving support-staff education options makes sense because budget shortfalls mean fewer MLS positions, he said, and because graduate schools aren’t producing enough students to keep up with retirements. Abbott claims that now’s the time to act to investigate a certification system for all library workers modeled on the United Kingdom’s charter system, “one that recognizes the value of ongoing education and provides a way to manage the process.”
Spotlight on Cuba, ALA in the Middle
Portrayed by some as intellectual-freedom fighters and by others as U.S.-backed dissidents, the so-called “independent librarians” of Cuba operate private libraries, generally small collections of books loaned out of political activists’ homes—books said not to be available in Cuban public libraries.
The debate over the independent librarians is not a new one (AL, Feb. 2001, p. 31), but it escalated in March when at least 10 were arrested in an islandwide sweep of dissidents that has been condemned by Human Rights Watch and other groups. Cuban courts handed out prison terms of up to 28 years to the 75 people arrested for “mercenary activities and other acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the Cuban state,” according to the June 28 New York Times.
For 10 days in June, ALA and the Cuban independent librarians were the subject of a rash of newspaper coverage; some editorials accused ALA of lacking the moral conviction to support them in their struggle for intellectual freedom.
What seems to have sparked the press frenzy was a tip that the ALA International Relations Committee had invited five library professionals from Cuba—and no independent librarians—to speak in Toronto. However, ALA International Office Director Michael Dowling said that the organizers, who obtained a supporting grant last year from the Social Science Research Council to foster professional exchanges, wanted experts in the specific areas of “library education, library associations, outreach to the community, service to rural areas, and collections.”
The Canadian venue seemed fitting, especially in the wake of the delay by the U.S. State Department in granting a visa to Marta Terry, president of the Asociación Cubana de Bibliotecarios, the Cuban library association, to attend the 2001 Annual Conference in San Francisco.
Terry appeared at the IRC presentation in Toronto, along with three working librarians from Cuban territorial, provincial, and municipal libraries. The final presenter was Eliades Acosta, director of the José Martí National Library in Havana, who confronted the independent-librarians issue head-on, contrasting the professional librarians “who work to serve every single Cuban in difficult, adverse conditions imposed by the U.S. embargo” with the independents who receive books, equipment, and salaries “from the U.S. government.”
Afterwards, Friends of Cuban Libraries co-founder Robert Kent, an independent-library backer and an agitator for ALA action to support them, asked, “Why is Cuba the only country to throw librarians in jail for opening uncensored libraries?” Acosta replied that they were punished for violating Cuban sedition law, not for espousing intellectual freedom. Also in the audience was Ramón Colas, who launched the independent library movement in 1998 but who now resides in Miami.
Kent and Colas were among those lobbying the ALA Council to adopt a resolution deploring the actions of the Castro regime and calling for the release of the independents, but the resolution was referred to the IRC for further investigation. The Canadian Library Association’s Council, however, adopted a resolution asking IFLA to further investigate the role of independent libraries in Cuba. The CLA resolution also opposed any foreign attempts to undermine Cuba’s government—activities of which Kent and his colleagues have been accused.
Terrorism Law Presents Challenges
Two speakers from diametrical perspectives recommended similar approaches to dealing with the USA Patriot Act in “Managing Libraries in the Age of Terrorism,” presented by the Library Administration and Management Association’s Buildings and Equipment Section.
“Despite my affiliation,” joked CIA Senior Intelligence Officer Lee Strickland, “I am an enthusiastic supporter of the Constitution and most of the amendments.” Strickland, currently a visiting professor at the University of Maryland Graduate College of Information Studies, asserted that “America is at war with a force that knows how to exploit our liberties.” The government requires tools to address this challenge, he said, but there must also be balances to protect those liberties.
Strickland offered an overview of the Patriot Act, which he characterized as a measure that fine-tunes existing legal provisions to reflect new technologies and remove anomalies in the law. The far-reaching act affects criminal law, intelligence law, and—in an area that Strickland said has gone under the radar of the media and the public—banking and finance law.
Attempting to assuage the concerns of civil libertarians about the law’s more draconian provisions, Strickland raised but largely brushed aside its authorizations of secret court orders, military tribunals, and the right to monitor patron-lawyer conversations.
Strickland summarized key management steps to take in response to the Patriot Act, including the necessity for a records-management program, as well as the “absolutely critical” need to establish protocols for staff to follow in the event of a visit from the authorities. The key, Strickland concluded, is developing your policies and knowing how you’re going to respond when law enforcement calls.
Noting the cliché that the best offense is a good defense, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, advised that libraries establish policies in three areas: confidentiality of user records, records retention, and responding to law enforcement. After working with your attorney to devise such policies, put them into writing and share them with your staff through training, she urged.
Caldwell-Stone stressed that when faced with a request for records, “it’s not unpatriotic for the librarian to ask questions.” She said that although the Patriot Act imposes a gag order forbidding staff from disclosing that a search warrant was served, it permits the library to consult legal counsel, which she said should always be the first step.
When crafting privacy policies, libraries should begin by conducting a privacy audit to determine what electronic and paper records are kept that contain personally identifiable information, Caldwell-Stone recommended. Libraries should review their record-retention polices to avoid collecting unnecessary records and keeping them longer than needed.
A final consideration, said Caldwell-Stone, is maintaining good communication with groups outside the library as a means of publicizing your policies and maintaining support. “Be sure to contact the media before they contact you,” she advised.
Academic Librarians without Borders
With a glimpse back to his first ALA conference some 30 years earlier, Ernie Ingles, associate vice president and chief librarian at the University of Alberta, launched the Association of College and Research Libraries and Canadian Association of College and University Libraries Presidents’ Program, “New Realities, New Relationships across Borders.”
One of the prevailing issues then “was an uncertainty about the role of the librarian in the global village—a new construct at the time,” he observed. Today, “our new realities and our new relationships are not so new, nor are they profound. . . . We must understand what it means to provide service worldwide,” he said. It is the harmonization of differing world views that “makes us such an important part of the human condition in terms of how we satisfy the need for information, the need for knowledge.”
Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, remarked that it was a pleasure—while preparing for the program—to concentrate on the substantive issues concerning libraries, rather than how much money they need in the university’s budget. “If you want to get more money from your presidents, you may want to have him or her come here to speak,” he joked.
Some of those library concerns—such as increasing diversity in the profession or striking a balance between digital and print resources—will require librarians to work with university administrators, looking at the broader underlying issues, he noted. And one of the most pressing challenges is for librarians to find ways to bridge the gap between the profession and the rest of the world—to communicate, in language that people understand, the value of their work.
Tech Trends Need a Study Guide
“A tremendous amount of content is imperiled because it’s not being managed properly for the long term,” warned Coalition for Networked Information Director Clifford Lynch in his program, “Cliff’s Notes,” which touched on a range of technology and information policy topics, from blogs to institutional repositories to the not-so-science-fiction idea of personal “life logs.”
The good news: In the academic world, “at least some universities are starting to get serious about records management,” Lynch reported. But “the 800-pound gorilla everyone is in denial about” is the shift toward offering courses in digital form. “In our rush to embrace and explore capabilities of the digital world, we haven’t thought very much about policy issues,” he said, noting that key questions remain about who owns course materials, who owns student work, and how visible those materials should be to the rest of the world.
One wide open—though difficult, both technically and policywise—research area is that of personalization, although “the library community has largely ignored personalization out of an unwillingness to engage in a much more nuanced landscape of privacy,” Lynch said. “It’s a very confusing place, and that means the stakes are high.” But projects like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s LifeLog—concerned with capturing and storing data to help an individual more accurately recall and use past experiences—prove that the idea that a person could wear an apparatus that would record everything he did and saw is “really not that crazy.”
“We’re becoming very dependent on digital resources, and we’re starting to recognize this. Digital resources have become an integral, essential part of our cultural record,” he explained. While the idea of giving away copies of such materials is one we may not be comfortable with, “we’ve had a lot of very sad reminders in the last decade of how vulnerable these materials are,” Lynch noted, and “there’s no excuse not to.”
Reaching Out to Immigrant Teens
Deborah Ellis knows a lot about being a stranger in a strange land. As a gay teen, the author of The Breadwinner (Douglas & McIntyre, 2001) was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital for a couple of years. She shared her views on what it’s like to be an outsider at “Living in the Salad Bowl: Serving Immigrant Teens,” sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association. Writing a book for young people about Afghanistan, allowed her to talk with a lot of kids there and to understand the universality of human experience.
“Isolation is a huge barrier,” said panelist j wallace, coordinator of the Newcomer Youth Centre at CultureLink, a United Way agency in Toronto, and “racism is a big issue to youth who want to get an education and work.”
Libraries are unique, wallace said, because they are free and young people can spend lots of time in them without having to shop. Supporting him were two Youth Centre users who spoke about their difficulties as immigrants from Saudi Arabia and the Congo.
For librarians to serve the special needs of immigrant teens, a good relationship with their parents is necessary, said Jennifer Johnson, librarian at Ottawa (Ont.) Public Library’s Rosemount branch. Often, she said, younger people will coax hesitant elders into the library.
The Internet has become an essential component of service to immigrant communities, Johnson noted, since it permits people to correspond with relatives in their country of origin. With sensitivity and quality collections, especially of electronic products, the library can serve as a bridge to a better life, she said. And it is especially important that libraries be perceived as safe places for inquiry.
Johnson and wallace touted the value of programs that involve cooperation with other agencies and that utilize the community-service hours required of high school students in Toronto. Johnson talked about the “Share the Word” program that matched students with reluctant readers.
Reporting for American Libraries are George Eberhart, Gordon Flagg, Pamela Goodes, Amy Jordan, and Leonard Kniffel. Photographs by Oscar and Associates, and selected AL staff.
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