Washington Office Update, Part Two

January 21, 2010

The ALA Washington Office is asking librarians and library supporters to urge the Obama Administration and the Senate to support jobs for libraries as part of the Jobs for Main Street Act. According to Director Emily Sheketoff, $650 million is being requested from this stimulus bill that will fund up to 13,000 jobs nationwide at public libraries.

Sheketoff said the money would be distributed through the Institute of Museum and Library Services and distributed to states by a formula of population needs to assist local library patrons in enhancing their work skills.

"We need to raise our voices and be out front about this," Sheketoff maintained. "We think that one of the reasons we have not been more aggressive with this stimulus is because governors and the mayors feel that ‘they [libraries] will just more with less.'"

"Even in the toughest economic times, there is money and it’s going somewhere and it should be coming to us," she told those attending the Washingtonton Update during the Midwinter Meeting. "We are serving the community and they will be there for us if we ask them. ALA is successful as it is because we are famous for our grassroots. You've got to get up and shake things up including by getting the community involved."

There is also a push for the upcoming Library Advocacy Day Rally that will take place June 29 during the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., described by Sheketoff as an opportunity to celebrate library services that we deliver to the public."

The event replaces the annual Library Legislative Day for one year only. Legislative Day will resume in May 2011."

After the rally, participants, armed with a packed of materials from the Washington Office, will be asked to visit their members of Congress . "Instead of the hundreds of people we have at Legislative Day, we’re hoping for thousands of people to really show the strong support that library services have and the strong commitment that we, as librarians, have to those library services.

For more information, visit www.ala.org/washoff.

Tagged Under

Legislation

Al Gore at ALA Midwinter 2010, part 1

Al Gore presents the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture, discussing his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston January 16, 2010. Part 1 of 9. More ALA videos at alfocus.ala.org.

Latest Library Links

2h

Eleanor Hecks writes: “Few things are as frustrating to a user as when a site won’t respond. Unfortunately, it’s also an all-too-common scenario. Graceful degradation is a design approach that ensures the basics of a website will still function even if specific individual parts of it stop working. The approach removes single points of failure: just because one thing stops working doesn’t mean the system as a whole fails. A site following this principle fails in pieces instead of all at once, so the most important features remain available when some components encounter an error.”

Smashing Magazine, Dec. 6
21h

Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

WVLT-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.), Dec. 4
1d

Joe Foley writes: “Copyright rules vary from country to country and have changed over time. In the US, works created between 1929 and 1963 that gave notice and renewed copyright have 95 years from their first publication date. That means that on January 1, 2025, a host of works from 1929 will enter the public domain. This means that copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster’s first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye.” Other notable works entering public domain in the United States include the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, contralto Marian Anderson’s first record, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Creative Bloq, Dec. 7; Everybody’s Libraries, Dec. 3, Dec. 7; Public Domain Review, Dec. 10
2d

Brittany Adams writes: “The digital landscape of libraries is expanding rapidly, with an increasing shift towards electronic resources and online services. As members of the library community, we’re witnessing a transformative era where physical collections are complemented—and sometimes replaced—by digital ones. This transition offers new opportunities for enhancing accessibility and engagement, but it also presents challenges, especially for young patrons and their families. It is essential to equip children and their caregivers with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate this evolving space confidently.”

ALSC Blog, Dec. 9
2d

Karen O’Grady writes: “I am the embedded librarian for the Hahn School of Nursing at the University of San Diego. I am surrounded by nursing faculty, staff, and students rather than by librarians. This has proven to be an incredible gamechanger for the way I see things. Every student in my school knows me by name. I am often stopped in the hallway to answer questions. Every correct answer I give increases my authority and builds trust. Through these casual mini-lessons, this foreign animal called ‘librarian’ slowly becomes an approachable, knowledgeable person.”

College & Research Libraries News, Dec.
2d

ALA has selected 46 participants for its 2025 class of Emerging Leaders (EL). The EL program allows library staff and information workers to participate in project planning work groups, network with peers, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity early in their careers. The group will take part in a day-long session during the 2025 LibLearnX conference in Phoenix this January and work for six months, culminating in a poster session at ALA’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia in June, where they will highlight results of their project planning work.

ALA Office for Human Resource Development and Recruitment, Dec. 4
3d

On December 9, ALA announced a $25 million bequest by James W. Lewis, of Washington, D.C. The gift, the largest individual bequest in ALA’s history, will fund scholarships for aspiring librarians with demonstrated financial needs. Throughout Lewis’s career at Merrill Lynch, where he leads the Lewis Group as senior vice president and senior relationship manager, he has demonstrated his commitment to libraries and their communities by generously volunteering his time, including as a member of the Board of Visitors at the library of his alma mater, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He also served as a Library Trustee Board member at District of Columbia Public Library for 10 years.”

AL: The Scoop, Dec. 9