Here are some highlights of the ALA 2010 Annual Conference held in Washington, DC from June 26-29.
These highlights are necessarily selective. They are also, of course, somewhat idiosyncratic. This is a huge conference with over 26,000 attendees of all sorts, and no single person can be everywhere. For more information on what transpired at the conference, go to www.ala.org. Electronic versions of Cognotes, the daily “newspaper” of the conference will be posted shortly (just search for Cognotes). The full minutes of the three Council Meetings (Council is the legislative body of ALA) will be posted within a few weeks.
With that said, here are some notes that might be of interest to our MLA members and other library lovers in Maine.
Congress is, as anyone who reads the newspapers knows, not in a very bipartisan mood these days. With anti-incumbent sentiment at supposedly an all time high and elections coming in November, the likelihood of pressing forward with library-related legislation is not extremely high. Nonetheless, ALA is doing its best to keep the interests of libraries in front of Congress. Council passed several resolutions to support the ALA legislative agenda during this conference. For a summary of the key issues that ALA is pursuing on behalf of libraries in this session of Congress, and particular steps you can take to support those efforts, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/ogr/issuebriefs/2010_key.pdf.
One of the things Congress is likely to get to before fall elections is trying to protect the cyberinfrastucture of the country. “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010” (S. 3480) would make the Department of Homeland Security responsible for protecting not only military and government information facilities but also civilian telecommunication networks if the President declares a national emergency. ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and the ALA Washington Office feel that changes to the bill are needed to protect free speech and privacy rights. People in Maine may have a significant role to play in monitoring the progress of this legislation since Senator Collins is a key co-sponsor of the bill.
Continuing in the Intellectual Freedom vein, the Freedom to Read Foundation (you are a member, right? – 35 bucks a year, see www.ftrf.org) announced the availability in 2010 of local Banned Books Week Read-Out Grants. The idea is to have local events during Banned Books Week in which authors read from books which have been banned or challenged. Application details will be announced in July. There will be a quick turn-around so keep an eye peeled for application details. Whether your library gets a grant or not, be sure to plan some events at your library during Banned Books Week, to be held this year from September 25-October 2.
There were a huge number of vendors at the conference. Here are a few products or services that may be of particular interest to libraries in Maine.
Many Maine libraries have rich local history and genealogy collections, and not all of them are available electronically. The ResCarta Foundation would like to help change that situation. The Foundation has created a set of free, open source tools that libraries can use to create digital archives of their special collections of all types and make them available either locally or on the web. They even offer tech support! For more information or to download the free tool set, check www.rescarta.org.
Genealogy is a passion for many Mainers, and our libraries are great sources for information and help. Most of those interested in the subject know of www.familysearch.org as a rich source of genealogical information. But what not everyone knows is that the Family Search site depends heavily on 300,000 volunteers to input genealogy information from old records so that the information can be searched. This is an activity that may appeal to those who have some free time and interest in the subject. Check the web site to see how your patrons, friends groups, local senior centers, or other local folks can help expand the records available to genealogy researchers.
We’ve all heard a lot about how the Obama administration asserts it is committed to making government information more available to the public. For those looking for science information, there is now a single entry point for science information generated by the federal government across 15 different government entities covering over 200 million pages. Point your patrons to (and take a look yourself) www.science.gov. We’ve paid for it – now we can get at it!
That’s it for one person’s version of a very few selected highlights from the ALA 2010 Annual Conference, and it will be my final posting on these pages. My term as the Maine Library Association’s Chapter Councilor to the American Library Association is over today. I’ve enjoyed the job and now move over to let Jim Riordan take on that work for the next three years.
As a final word, having seen the difference on both the state and national levels that library associations make for libraries and librarians, I encourage you to become a member of both the Maine Library Association and the American Library Association. Times are, of course, tough but the dues of both together add up to the equivalent a Starbucks coffee once a week. It is money well invested if you love libraries.
Be well (and thanks for the fish),
Jim Campbell
MLA Chapter Councilor (Retired)
