ALA Midwinter Unveils Online Voting
RSSUpcoming elections take center stage; CIPA tactics discussed at San Diego gathering
By Susan DiMattia, Rick Margolis, Walter Minkel, Evan St. Lifer, and Luann Toth -- School Library Journal, 02/01/2004
ALA's membership committee also proposed adding a new category called "library support staff," with a reduced membership fee to attract more members. Members will vote online this spring on whether to add the new category.
Barbara Stripling and Michael Gorman, the two candidates for the 2005 ALA presidency, campaigned vigorously in meetings with individual division boards and spoke at a candidates' forum. Stripling (www.barbstripling.net), director of library programs for New York-based New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit school advocacy organization, is urging ALA to adopt an "action agenda around 21st century skills," such as information and media literacy. Gorman (www.MichaelGorman.org), dean of library services at California State University in Fresno, says he wants to improve equitable access to library education by recruiting more minorities to the profession.
ALA also took steps to appease exhibitors frustrated by sparse traffic on the exhibit floor. The executive board agreed to schedule 90-minute intervals between some of the sessions and workshops at future conferences to allow attendees to spend more time on the showroom floor.
In other developments, Helen Adams, a former president of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), was named a member of the six-person Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) steering committee, which will monitor developments in the online filtering law. ALA had previously overlooked appointing representatives from its youth divisions to the committee, resulting in an uproar from AASL, the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC), and the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA).
ALSC's board has also launched the Maureen Hayes Author/Illustrator Visit Award, a $4,000 grant that will enable libraries and bookstores to bring more children's book creators to the library. The award is named after the late Maureen Hayes, a children's book publicist at Atheneum, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. ALSC also named Virginia Walter, dean of the Information School at UCLA, as winner of ALSC's Distinguished Service Award.
Also noteworthy was the fact that for the first time in YALSA's 42-year history, its membership of 4,089 exceeded ALSC's membership of 3,780. In the past three years, YALSA's campaigns, such as Teen Read Week, have garnered many new members from public libraries, middle schools, and high schools.
To top off the midwinter meeting, ALA's President's Program, "Living in a Post-CIPA World," focused on the future challenges that public libraries face following last summer's Supreme Court decision to let the filtering law stand. "By July 1 of this year, thousands of libraries are going to have to make a difficult choice," Hayden says. "They'll have to decide to install [Internet] filters or forfeit federal monies."
Two panelists, Charlie Parker, executive director of the Tampa Bay (FL) Library Consortium, and Alan Davidson, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, advised librarians to push vendors into making filters that are library-friendly—those that are less likely to over-block Web sites and give librarians more control over choosing the sites to be filtered.
Despite the attraction of warm weather, overall attendance at midwinter was significantly down—a total of 10,788 attendees and exhibitors registered for events and exhibits, nearly 3,000 less than those who attended last year's meeting in Philadelphia.
Indeed, competition for conference dollars has been particularly fierce this year, with librarians having to choose among ALA's midwinter meeting, AASL's October conference in Kansas City, and the Public Library Association conference in February.
