Life Without ALA…

At the same time, several states—including Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Colorado, West Virginia, and South Carolina—have launched "Book Watch" groups, to ensure that no school district carry titles construed as threatening to students' values or advocating a certain type of lifestyle or morality. Some of the most oft-cited works now permanently barred from most school libraries include Daddy's Roommate, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Chocolate War, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye, The Giver, It's Perfectly Normal , The Color Purple, and the Harry Potter series.

Further, libraries have begun posting warnings informing patrons they can no longer expect their circulation records to remain confidential, since local law enforcement authorities have almost carte blanche over them, courtesy of the recently passed USA Patriot Act.

Fair-use exemptions are now a footnote in the copyright law, having yielded to pay-as-you-go licensing scenarios, thanks to the wholesale passage by Congress in 2001 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA now gives information owners broad legal powers to use technology to place their information in a "digital wrapper."

The above scenario is any librarian's or free-speech advocate's worst nightmare. In fact, it would be frighteningly realistic, were it not for the American Library Association's (ALA) constant vigilance. Yet it's easy to take ALA for granted, given the prospect of not having an annual ALA conference for the first time in 60 years coupled with the less-than-stellar debut of its revamped Web site. At press time, attendees and exhibitors of ALA's annual conference were still deliberating over whether they felt comfortable enough to travel to Toronto (see News, p. 20) even after the World Health Organization lifted its travel restrictions to Canada's largest city. And talk about a really weird sense of déjà vu: ALA last nixed its annual show in 1943, which was scheduled for… Toronto. ALA sought to return there in 1946, but ended up in Buffalo after failing to secure enough conference space.

Perhaps you are now going to Toronto with trepidation, or have decided to cancel your plans, or have never been to an ALA conference, or aren't even a member. Perhaps you don't really see any relationship at all between ALA and your daily work. If you don't, you're wrong. Due to the tireless work of its staff over the last 30 years, ALA's inexorable defense of the First Amendment and intellectual freedom have resulted in landmark court decisions and historic legislation in the areas of free speech, intellectual freedom, privacy, and copyright. So whether or not you've decided to attend ALA this year and despite your discontent with ALA's balky Web site, remember: without ALA, the aforementioned bad dream is a lot closer to reality than you think.

Evan St. Lifer Editor estlifer@reedbusiness.com