PLA Blog

It WAS a lot of librarians. A large representation of our 65,000 members, I’d say.

Carol Brey-Casiano was gracious and continued her grassroots advocacy theme as she ran through the year’s highlights - threatened closings of whole library systems, salary issues, the Freedom to Read Act, funding. Even the awards of ALA honorary member and trustee citations were for advocacy: for Native American Indians, for library funding and cooperation, for visibility in the community.

Mayor Daley of Chicago was very passionate about libraries as part of the education experience. To him they are just as vital as fire stations and police stations and schools; they are community anchors. In this town, people move to neighborhoods where new libraries are being built. The mayor has built or renovated 45 libraries in Chicago, and another 7 will open next year. Most importantly, those libraries are being staffed with trained librarians. The citizens have allowed him to invest in libraries by voting for tax increases to fund libraries. I was disappointed that he left teenagers out of the list when he talked about libraries as places for access for ALL: “new immigrants, senior citizens, children, and families.”

The stage was cleared of all but the sign language interpreter as Senator Barack Obama took the stage in a lightning storm of flash bulbs, beginning with a shout out to a co-worker’s librarian mom, and a public apology to the librarians who gave him time out from the library nearly every day in junior high.

I was moved and impressed by his remarks, much of which focused on the need for a literate population and the need to preserve our fundamental civil liberties. He said “Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible,” and had great suggestions for reducing the number of adults that cannot read a bedtime story to their children (currently, 1 in 5), such as handing out library cards to every newborn’s parents, replacing the toy surprise in a fast food meal with a book, creating mobile libraries to roll through parks, and encouraging parents to step in and turn off the TV.

These are all wonderful ideas, and we clapped and cheered and nodded - but how many of us are going to return home and send letters to burger joints advocating for copies of Goodnight Moon instead of Beanie Babies as junk food prizes? I can only hope we can sustain the passion and enthusiasm we raised in North Hall B on Saturday evening. Just as the Senator made a case for the need to move away from 19th and 20th century ideas about education because we aren’t an agricultural/industrial society anymore, so do we need to move forward with our libraries. I could write for the rest of the night about how we need to try new ideas and have pilot projects and reinvent ourselves and stop judging what we fear, but it’s 2 AM and I was planning on an 8 AM program. Plus, no one wants to read another video game rant And, one of our blogger’s draft is shaping up better than my nearly incoherent thoughts, so watch for more articulate comments soon.

Tags: ALA2005, conferences

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 2:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.