ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle Draws Solid Crowd

-- Library Journal, 1/22/2007

Seattle—chilly and hilly, but with a booming downtown around the Seattle Public Library's Central Library and the city's convention center—proved a solid draw for the American Library Association's (ALA) Midwinter Meeting. Attendance figures surpassed the totals for the past two years. There were 8145 registrants by the end of the day Friday, with the total, including exhibitors, reaching 10,355. The comparable figures for the 2006 event in San Antonio were 6926 and 9297; the numbers for the 2005 meeting in Boston were 7592 and 10,022.

ALA leaders were buoyed by several things. The organization's endowment has grown, from $25.5 million to $29 million, in one year. The ALA-APA (Allied Professional Association) is finally experiencing positive net revenues. And a new Democrat-controlled Congress is expected to favor legislation friendly to libraries or at least resist Republican encroachments on issues such as privacy. While there continues to be much concern about federal libraries, there was better news from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); six representatives came to the conference, pledging that the agency, which has closed five of 26 libraries, would reach out before further changes.

TIME magazine columnist Joe Klein, presenting the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture Saturday, offered some harsh and sobering observations about the administration of George W. Bush. While during World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt "became the educator-in-chief," Bush, in Klein's view, failed not only to call Americans to sacrifice "on September 12," but also to educate the country about the people responsible for the terrorist acts. While he acknowledged that "I know this is tough" in certain communities, Klein told librarians "you should have displays and programs, front and center, about Islam and about the region. We're in a long-term conflict with Islamic extremism." He told librarians they were the "curators" of the habits of citizenship that we as a society have lost.

The ALA Annual Conference, to be held in Washington, DC in June, promises a focus on national and international issues. Former Vice-President Al Gore, star of the hit documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has been tentatively identified as the speaker for the opening general session. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a noted environmental lawyer, has been confirmed as the speaker for the ALA President's Program. Confirmed auditorium speakers include documentary filmmaker Ken Burns; Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner; and Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today.