Business as Usual? No Way

Like the Saturday Night Live routine that was inspired by a Chicago diner--the skit where short-order cook John Belushi barks at his customers: "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger. No Coke, Pepsi"--last month's American Library Association's conference was as memorable for what was absent as for what was available.

Unlike recent conferences, this time there was no hand-wringing over Internet filtering and censorship issues. Instead, conferees considered subjects dearer to their hearts: for instance, how to help young people search the Web more wisely. And unlike last year's bash in New Orleans, there were no celebrity-fueled brouhahas: no Colin Powell (whose $70,000 fee for the keynote address irked some librarians); no Dr. Laura, the radio talk-show host who vilified ALA, insisting the organization's opposition to Internet filtering was "boldly, brashly sexualizing our children." But whatever the Second City conference lacked in pyrotechnics, it more than made up for in enthusiasm.

At a standing-room-only session on the future of electronic publishing, Nick Sheridon, a Palo Alto, CA-based physicist working with the Xerox Corporation, elicited a larger gasp when he unveiled a prototype of his latest invention, a reusable electronic paper called Gyricon. If Sheridon's predictions hold true, three or four years from now, readers worldwide will be downloading their newspapers onto a low-cost e-paper device that George Jetson would have envied. Conventional, paper-based newspapers as we know them may soon become a thing of the past. (For more details, see "Sliced from the Cutting Edge.")

Left to right: Joyce Kasman Valenza, library information specialist, Springfield Township (PA) High School, Frances Jacobson, librarian, University Laboratory High School, Urbana, IL, and Barbara Genco, director of collection development, Brooklyn (NY) Public Library.

Jamie McKenzie, an educational consultant, turned his attention to more immediate concerns. Kids must learn to formulate questions before they do an Internet search, said McKenzie, addressing a packed room at the American Association of School Librarians' president's program. Before students can choose the best route to finding what they need online, McKenzie said, they need some way of gauging the relevance of the mounds of data they retrieve. Describing himself as a "recovering superintendent," McKenzie said he's disturbed by administrators who talk about how "wired" their students are, rather than how literate they are. He urged school librarians to become outspoken activists for information literacy. "The vast majority of teachers never heard of Information Power [ALA, 1998]," he said. McKenzie also wants the teaching of information literacy to be part of every subject in the curriculum. (For more on McKenzie, see "The Hunchback of Notre Disney.")

Kids and research skills were also front and center at a program sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA, a division of ALA). School librarian and writer Joyce Kasman Valenza described the difficulties of trying to teach research skills to teens who think they're experts on the Web. Nonetheless, Valenza thinks librarians need to work at proving they can help students get better information. "Unless we clearly demonstrate it, kids won't see us as the guides we are," she said.

But teens are indeed a tough sell, as was demonstrated by the other half of the YALSA panel, a group of six young adults. Though the kids all said they wanted help in finding information, they admitted that they rarely turn to librarians to ask for it. Why? "I think it's a bit of pride," admitted one student. "Teenagers think it's like being a little kid to go and ask a librarian." All the more reason, said Valenza, for librarians to create Web pages that lead kids to good information.

What about kids who seem to spend their whole lives on the Internet, whose activities--chatting with strangers, playing games with dark themes, downloading copyrighted materials--frighten many adults? According to writer Jon Katz, whose book Geeks (Villard, 2000) tracks two teens with little in their lives but the Net, if librarians want to reach teens who are immersed in Web culture, they need to understand and validate that culture. Instead, many school officials and other adults have taken to pathologizing kids who spend a lot of time with computers, viewing them as stupid or mentally unstable. In fact, much of the new Internet culture--including games like Doom and Quake--is literate and creative, Katz said. But the kids dealing with this new technology still need guidance. "Kids really need adults in their lives, but you can't be in their lives if you're constantly trashing their culture," he noted.

Penny Markey, left, youth services coordinator, County of Los Angeles Public Library, and Carol Fiore, children's program specialist, State Library of Florida. More pictures from ALA

The annual Margaret A. Edwards Awards luncheon was rechristened the YALSA Awards luncheon, to make room for the Printz Award winner and honorees. The main speaker was Edwards Award winner Chris Crutcher, who talked about his childhood, recounting with humor and pathos how he would butt heads with his stern father and play caretaker to his alcoholic mother. Not surprisingly, those experiences turn up in various ways in his fiction. "I learned as much from the 'bad' stuff as from the 'good' stuff," he said, "and that fact in itself erases whatever line I thought might have been drawn between good and bad."

Of course, this year's conference happened to fall on "Harry" weekend, and Potter fever was everywhere in evidence. Many conference-goers couldn't resist hitting the midnight countdown at the large Borders bookstore on Michigan Avenue, where hundreds of eager kids and adults snaked through the aisles; the overflow crowd included even Scholastic's Arthur A. Levine, under whose imprint the Harry Potter books are published. One librarian said the mood was as festive as Woodstock, only instead of being asked, "What's your sign?" kids came up to her and asked, "What's your house?"

Still, no wizardry could make more books appear when Borders ran out of stock before 1 a.m. Though Scholastic didn't sell The Goblet of Fire at its exhibit booth, it did bestow free copies of the book on those lucky conferees who attended the publisher's Saturday night reception. Those who went to the Grolier breakfast the next day also got copies. (Grolier was recently purchased by Scholastic.) And at least one enterprising librarian, who had the book delivered to her hotel courtesy of Amazon.com and Federal Express, stayed up until 4 a.m., finishing the 734-page novel. --Rick Margolis and Andrea Glick