A San Francisco Treat

By Saturday morning at 8, they were everywhere: taking the long way around the construction at Union Square, crowding the curb at the busy intersection of Stockton and Market, streaming down Fourth Street toward the Moscone Convention Center, carrying their many-colored tote bags and the same oversized, soft-covered manual. Yes, they were conference-goers: librarians, publishers, vendors, and their spouses and kids, out in record numbers for this year's American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference, June 14–20. It's always astonishing to see just how big these ALA conferences are, but San Francisco, a compact city where people still walk, seems to concentrate the effect of all those out-of-towners converging on one place. This year, the conference didn't just seem bigger, it was bigger—the biggest yet, according to ALA figures, with 26,542 people in attendance, more exhibitors than ever, and what seemed like enough children's authors to sign a small library's worth of autographed books.

In fact, the conference was so successful at drawing people that ALA has grown right out of any more conferences in San Francisco. The city just doesn't have the hotel or convention-center capacity to satisfy ALA's burgeoning show. So at its fall meeting, ALA's executive board will consider moving the 2011 conference, originally scheduled for San Francisco, to New Orleans. And the 2012 conference may be switched from New Orleans to Anaheim, CA.

Of course, no ALA conference is complete without some political dustup, and this year it was the labor tension at the San Francisco Marriott. As the official conference headquarters, the Marriott hosted several big programs and events, including the Newbery/Caldecott and Inaugural banquets. Conference-goers passing the hotel on the way to the convention center were greeted by about 20 picketers, banging drums and shouting chants, such as "A-L-A / Please don't stay / A-L-A / Go away!" The picketers were protesting ALA's decision to hold its event at the Marriott despite the fact that Local 2 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union has been calling for a boycott of the hotel for the last year. The union, which signed up a majority of Marriott workers in 1996, blames the hotel for the fact that employees still don't have a contract.

ALA declined requests by the San Francisco Library Commission and others to relocate its Marriott events, citing hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be lost due to contractual obligations. The ALA council considered ways to avert similar problems in the future, perhaps by adding an escape clause to association contracts that would cover not only strikes but boycotts. (See "ALA Business," below) Though most people crossed the picket line in San Francisco, there were notable exceptions. Absent from the Newbery/Caldecott dinner, for instance, were editors from Holiday House. And several people boycotted the Inaugural Banquet, where ALA welcomes its new leaders and honors its award winners. No-shows included Mitch Freedman, ALA president-elect for 2002–03; Patricia Schuman, co-owner of Neal-Schuman publishing and winner of the Joseph W. Lippincott Award for distinguished service to the library profession; and Michael Gorman, winner of the Highsmith Library Literature Award.

Of course, the biggest fallout from the Marriott labor flap was the cancellation of the Coretta Scott King Awards Breakfast, a heavily attended event (see News, July 2001 ). Members of the King Awards Task Force decided a couple of weeks before the conference to cancel the breakfast after receiving a letter asking them to do so from the award's namesake, Coretta Scott King. The cancellation meant forfeiting $24,000 in fees, as well as any money the event might have generated. Those who had paid for seats were offered a refund or could donate the money to help defray expenses.

ALA's children's divisions seemed in good health this summer. The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) celebrated its 50th anniversary at its annual awards luncheon with a program highlighting the association's history. Among the honors bestowed were the National School Library Media Program of the Year Award, which went in the single-school category to Corbett Elementary School of Tucson, AZ, and in the large-school-district category to the DeKalb County (GA) School System. Dr. Hilda Jay of Bowie, MD, received the AASL Distinguished Service Award for an outstanding national contribution to school librarianship. And AASL President Harriet Selverstone presented the Crystal Apple Award to 3M Library Systems for donating $2.5 million worth of library detection systems to schools.

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the smallest of the children's divisions, reported that its membership rose by 25 percent, to 3,125. YALSA also approved the debut of "Yattitudes," a quarterly electronic newsletter for members. Attendance at the YALSA awards luncheon, featuring a speech by Margaret A. Edwards Award winner Robert Lipsyte, was a record 434 people. And the second annual celebration of the Michael L. Printz Award, featuring Printz Award winner David Almond and the Printz Award honorees, drew a crowd of 325.

The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) had one of the year's most festive awards presentations, which included the first annual Robert F. Sibert Medal for young people's nonfiction. Author Marc Aronson played a recording of Elizabethan music as he talked about researching and writing Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado(Clarion, 2000), the Sibert winner. Aronson said he'd used the same music to create a mood while writing the book and found it helpful in defining his characters. Scholastic editor Arthur A. Levine accepted the Batchelder Award for Samir and Yonatan by Daniella Carmi, a novel translated from the Hebrew that tells the story of a Palestinian boy who forms a bond with some Jewish youngsters during a hospital stay. Levine said he hoped U.S. publishers would bring out more books from other countries and cultures. "We must learn to hear and see and understand those who seem impossibly foreign," he said.

The two topics that hijacked most of council's time this summer involved hotel contracts and reducing the quorum for membership meetings. The labor dispute at the Marriott Hotel led to a resolution requiring all pending and future hotel contracts to contain both a strike and a boycott clause. That would give ALA the option of voiding contracts if labor unions have endorsed either type of action. (ALA's contracts currently contain only a strike clause; in San Francisco, union representatives were urging a boycott but Marriott workers were not on strike.) After lengthy discussion, council referred the resolution to ALA's Conference Committee and to the Budget Analysis and Review Committee.

The other time-eater was the ongoing debate of whether to lower the quorum for membership meetings, which are held only at the annual conference. Several years ago, ALA significantly raised the number of members needed for a quorum to one percent of membership or roughly 650 people. Since then, the membership meeting has rarely drawn a quorum and so could not take official action. The heat surrounding the issue dissipated somewhat when 700-some people showed up for the second membership meeting. Council established a one-year committee to study the issue.

The actual timing of conferences resulted in two resolutions: to avoid scheduling the midwinter meeting over Martin Luther King Day, and to avoid scheduling the annual conference over Father's Day. King passed; Father's Day didn't.

One of this year's council resolutions was an outcome of the outsourcing hue and cry of several years back. After a proposal by executive board member Sally Reed, council adopted this policy on privatization: "ALA affirms that publicly funded libraries should remain directly accountable to the publics they serve. Therefore, ALA opposes the shifting of policy making and management oversight of library services from the public to the private sector." Finally, the Conference Committee floated a proposal to shorten the midwinter meeting schedule by one day, beginning in 2003. The Conference Committee will make a final recommendation at midwinter 2002.

School Libraries and Reading.In a program sponsored by AASL, University of Southern California researcher Steve Krashen ran through a litany of studies showing that two simple steps—giving kids books and the time to read them—leads to students who can read and do well on tests. In one study, for instance, Krashen and colleague Jeffrey McQuillan found that kids with more books in their homes, schools, and public libraries got higher reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Unfortunately, said Krashen, there's a huge disparity between the number of books available to poor versus wealthy children. Another study Krashen coauthored comparing the "print environment" of Beverly Hills children to that of children in the low-income Watts section of Los Angeles found that children in Beverly Hills had on average 200 books in their homes, while children in Watts had only four. Moreover, the average classroom library in Beverly Hills had 400 books; in Watts, 50. Krashen's prescription? Put more books in school libraries, which are today "a major source of books for our children."

Homeless Teens. In this YALSA program, filmmaker Maria Lovett screened a segment of her gripping documentary, Kids on the Ave, about a community of teenagers living on the streets of Seattle's University District. Seattle librarian Darlene Nordyke then described how she serves homeless kids from that area who, in fact, make up most of the teen users at Seattle Public Library's University Branch. Nordyke has made her library a haven for street kids by inviting them in, giving them tours, making sure they all have library cards, and, perhaps most important, waiving all fines on late or lost books and letting the kids use a local youth center as their address. Homeless youngsters are a great audience for library programs, according to the panelists. "They have plenty of time on their hands, and they want to occupy it," said Roger Hernandez of San Francisco's Larkin Street Youth Center.

How to Be Cool. At this year's Charlemae Rollins ALSC President's Program, Gene Del Vecchio, author of Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer's Guide to a Kid's Heart (Pelican, 1997), told the crowd that, like it or not, kids today are saturated with pop culture by ages five or six and libraries must go head-to-head with savvy advertisers in the quest for children's hearts and minds. How can librarians compete? Use some Madison Avenue techniques. For instance, ads don't just tell kids to buy products, Del Vecchio said, but offer something more important, like self-esteem or the chance to be cool. "Are you telling kids daily, 'You can be anything,' like the Barbie ads?" Del Vecchio asked. He also urged librarians to listen to what kids want. It's helpful, he explained, to see what kid magnets like Barnes & Noble are doing and to ask if you, too, are meeting kids' needs.

Future Shock?At an ALSC pre-conference program entitled "Future: Tense?," Harold Underdown of ipicturebooks.com demonstrated an e-book with text and full-color pictures that reads aloud—with sound effects—the story of the movie Shrek. Underdown said that e-picturebooks are indeed available, but will probably take some time to be accepted by consumers. The illustrator Don Wood, and his illustrator son, Bruce Wood, demonstrated how they use computers to illustrate picture books. Don uses computer graphics software to create traditional drawings and paintings. Bruce, on the other hand, uses 3-D graphics, and demonstrated how he created "wire-frame" skeletons of shapes for the letter-characters of Alphabet Adventure(Blue Sky, 2001) and then covered them with colored and textured surfaces. Using his computer, the younger Wood can also click on any spot in a picture and get a view of the scene from that angle.