Core Meltdown

* Connection of people to ideas;

* Assurance of free and open access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works;

* Commitment to literacy and learning;

* Respect for the individuality and the diversity of all people;

* Freedom for all people to form, to hold, and to express their own beliefs;

* Preservation of the human record;

* Excellence in professional service to our communities;

* Formation of partnerships to advance these values.

Although more than 50 of ALA's councilors endorsed these core values, nearly twice as many opposed them. Eventually, the council recommended that ALA's executive board create another process for writing a core-values statement.

So, what went wrong with this first attempt?

Plenty.

In swift response to an urgent recommendation of the 1999 Congress on Professional Education calling for an official guiding statement, Sarah Ann Long, then ALA president, created a task force. The 16-member task force, chaired by Donald J. Sager, an ALA councilor and publisher of Highsmith Press, was set to work, with orders to bring a draft to this year's annual conference for the council to review.

When the fifth and final draft was ready, not everyone was impressed. Criticism of the core values soon surfaced on an online discussion group. And some councilors spoke critically against the idea that the statement could influence graduate school curricula. Many councilors also found the core-values statement too general and too bland.

By far the strongest resistance to the adoption of the statement came from ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee (IFC), which explained its refusal to endorse in a critique widely distributed at the annual conference that noted: "IFC is of the opinion that it is not possible to capture the power and passion of what this profession means to all librarians in a distilled or abridged form. At this time we do not think that the essence of core values, expressed to a variety of audiences, can be captured in one document."

The fact that the draft did not employ the phrase "intellectual freedom" was serially bemoaned by councilors, many of whom agreed with IFC's perception that a core-values statement needed to be more than an internal document to help resolve the angst over professional education. Instead, these councilors think such a statement should also be able to promote library work to the general public and function as a recruitment tool to coax future librarians into the fold.

Nancy C. Kranich, ALA's new president, begins her term with the daunting task of leading ALA's executive board to plan the process of an alternative route to a one-size-covers-and-flatters-all statement on the ties that bind ALA's diverse specialists.--Lillian N. Gerhardt, School Library Journal's editor-at-large