“Collaboration, training, and information literacy are three of the most important issues facing media centers today,” said M. Ellen Jay, president of ALA’s American Association of School Librarians, at the end of the division’s ninth national conference in Birmingham, Alabama, November 10–14. Some 4,000 attendees, vendors, and volunteers surged to the South to “Unleash the Power!” of the school library, as the conference theme proclaimed, and participate in 278 workshops and concurrent sessions.
Author Maya Angelou opened her keynote address with the refrain, “When it looked like the sun wouldn’t shine any more, God put a rainbow in the clouds.” School librarians, she said, were rainbows to many less fortunate children.
For the first time, the conference was cosponsored by the International Association of School Librarians, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Seattle, giving many of the meetings a global flavor.
A full report on the conference will appear in the January 2000 issue of American Libraries.
Posted November 22, 1999.