The impassioned plea to attend ALA 2006
January 22nd, 2006 by Andrea MercadoSteven and I arrived to the President’s Progam a little late from lunch, to find a nice man from New Orleans (whose name escapes my mind) talking about the state of things in the host city of this year’s ALA annual conference. He took great pains to assure us that all is ready, that improvements continue to be made, and that we wouldn’t be guinea pigs for their improvements, so to speak, since other groups would be coming down before us. Overall, the city is ready, willing, and able to accomodate our conference, with clean air, clean water, and clean facilities. He also took the time to thank ALA for not moving the conference, for having the faith in the city, and for supporting the city by bringing the conference to New Orleans.
Michael Gorman rose and spoke briefly after this gentleman, and mentioned a library relief program for the libraries of New Orleans, and I think he mentioned something about being able to volunteer hands-on help at the conference for the libraries. A URL flashed on the scren behind him, but I wasn’t able to get the whole thing (those pesky, long ALA URLs ::sigh::). I’ve ben poking around on the ALA site, and I haven’t been able to find it, but if you know the URL of which I speak, please leave it in a comment for this post.
Andrei Codrescu also reiterated thanks and praise for ALA at the beginning of his presentation, and encouraged librarians to come to the conference, and not to cancel their travel plans. He also passed along a message from the head of the New Orleans library about the level of devastation to the library system, and how the ALA conference coming to New Orleans will really help rebuilding the libraries, but gave the sense that it would also rebuild the librarians, too.
If you’re interested in reading more about the upcoming conference, or if you’d like to register as an Early Bird, check out the ALA Annual 2006 site.
Tags: ALAMidwinter2006, conferences
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January 23rd, 2006 at 7:40 am
Did Mr. Codrescu speak about Cuba in his remarks or in comments afterwards?
January 23rd, 2006 at 10:02 am
Both, actually. My notes are a bit fuzzy on the whole event (he’s witty, and his accent was hard to decipher with my illness-clogged ears, so it was hard to follow and take notes at times), but part of his “official” remarks included a very direct calling-out of ALA on it’s inaction in the Cuba situation. In the Q&A session afterwards, there were many questions to Mr. Codrescu about Cuba, so he spoke some about it then, as well.
I hope to cobble my notes together into a post for later today, or early tomorrow…