New sponsors highlight upcoming season of Join the Major Leagues @ your library
Contact: Megan Humphrey
Campaign Coordinator
mhumphrey@ala.org
For Immediate Release
January 25, 2005
New sponsors highlight upcoming season of
Join the Major Leagues @ your library®
The Campaign for America's Libraries is pleased to announce that the Association of Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of ALA, REFORMA and the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum will team up with ALA and Major League Baseball to sponsor the Join the Major Leagues @ your library program.
REFORMA, an affiliate of ALA, is committed to the improvement of the full spectrum of library and information services for Spanish-speaking and Latino people in the United States. The Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum is a non-profit institution based in San Francisco dedicated to recognizing the contributions made to baseball by Hispanic players.
The Public Library Association (PLA), also a division of ALA, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will also continue as program sponsors.
Join the Major Leagues @ your library celebrates and promotes two of America’s oldest institutions -- baseball and libraries -- while heightening awareness of 21st Century literacy skills: the use of computers and other media to obtain information and improve communications.
The 2005 program will launch in the spring and will run through mid-September. The centerpiece of the program is the Join the Major Leagues @ your library contest, an online baseball trivia contest that challenges participants to utilize the resources available at the library to answer baseball trivia questions of increasing difficulty.
The trivia questions, developed by the library staff at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, will be available in English and Spanish and, for the first time, players will be able to enter their answers online or mail in an entry form. All questions will be available on the
Join the Major Leagues Web site. This year’s trivia questions will once again be organized by age group (10 and under, 11-13, 14-17 and 18 and older).
The grand-prize winner of the 2005 program will receive a trip to a game of the 2005 Major League Baseball World Series next fall. First-place prizes will also be awarded.
Incentives will be offered to libraries that participate in the program. The program will also be featured at libraries and ballparks in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit in the spring and summer. Look for more details on the 2005 program on the campaign Website at www.ala.org/@yourlibrary soon.
The program was developed by ALA, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association. The partnership is part of @ your library®, The Campaign for America’s Libraries, ALA’s multi-year public education and advocacy effort about the value of libraries and librarians in the 21st century.