Southern Comfort
A spirit of optimism defines AASL's National Conference in Birmingham, AL
Staff -- School Library Journal, 12/1/1999
There was an outpouring of good vibrations at last week's conference of the American Association of School Librarians, which was attended by 3,811 people. Maya Angelou urged the opening-session audience to be "a rainbow in the clouds" for the nation's schoolchildren. "A librarian, just because he or she knows so much, has the power of lighting up the darkest avenue," Angelou said.
Conference-goers also received quantitative encouragement in the form of a report by Keith Lance on his latest update to the famous "Colorado Study" of 10 years ago. Successful media programs have four characteristics, said Lance, director of the Library Research Service of the Colorado State Library. They are: sufficient staff, regular communication among librarians teachers, and principals, an adequate budget, and computers with Internet access.
On the vendor front, Bell & Howell introduced its new Digital Vault Periodical Archive, which converts the full text of 20 popular periodicals from UMI microfilm to a digitized format. Another company, H.W. Wilson, plans to make Reader's Guide files available online back to 1890. And Newsbank announced a deal with the Chicago Tribune in which it will offer every back issue of the paper in digital format, beginning in 1849.
