The first White House Conference on Library and Information Services (WHCLIS) was, quite literally, decades in the making. It was first proposed in 1957, and finally took place November 15–19, 1979.

Not surprisingly, American Libraries covered WHCLIS's development extensively throughout the 1970s, mostly in reports of the surprisingly twisty path to the passage of a bill authorizing it. A July-August 1973 report, for example, claimed (erroneously) that the idea for a White House Conference "Was born on the eve of the worst image setback suffered by the American library community at the hands of a federal administration"—President Richard Nixon's March request that Congress not fund libraries in the 1974 budget. (p. 410) The Conference was proposed for 1976, "in connection with" the Bicentennial.

The Senate approved the bill in 1973, and the House took it up the next year. Shown, the House Select Subcommittee on Education holds hearings on the bill to authorize WHCLIS. Shown are (from left) Peter Peyser (R-N.Y.), John Brademas (D-Ind.), William Sudow, assistant to Brademas, Jack Duncan, counsel to the subcommittee, and Orval Hansen (R-Idaho). (Feb. 1974, p. 89)

While the subcommittee's body language is less than promising, the bill passed the subcommittee and the House Education and Labor Committee, although the committee moved the conference back to 1977, either for wholly nonpolitical reasons or to reduce Nixon's potential influence. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii), who proposed the postponement, claimed that 1977 would provide needed time for planning. But, "Asked if the 1977 date she proposed was related to the incumbent and beleagured President Nixon, Mrs. Mink replied 'Somewhat.'" (July-August 1974, p. 348)

In the House, the real concern was less finding votes for the bill—it was widely supported by representatives of both parties, including Vice President-designate (and cosponsor) Gerald Ford—as it was getting the bill passed before adjournment. It did, on December 12; the conference version of the bill passed December 19, but not before the Senate added amendments, including another delay to "not later than 1978." (Feb. 1975, p. 78)

Of course, that authorization bill didn't provide any actual funding. A 1975 education appropriations bill initially provided $3.5 million, but that got cut in the final compromise version of the bill. (Sep. 1975, p. 469)

Still, the conference had a friend in the White House. Gerald Ford was a cosponsor of the House bill authorizing the conference in 1974, and on July 19, 1976 he declared "I am today announcing my intention to convene the White House Conference on Library and Information Services," with a promise to request the funding within the next few months. (Sep. 1976, p. 491) Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter also expressed his support for the conference in a letter to ALA President Clara Jones, which garnered both candidates a resolution of commendation from ALA Council.

Ford did follow through on his promise to seek the funding, but it wasn't approved until 1977. When the slightly reduced funding ($3 million) was provided, things got moving quickly. Georgia held the first state preconference September 15–16 that year (Nov. 529). From there, the path was a lot smoother: librarians and "lay people"—educators, business people, students, community leaders, homemakers, and, at the Pennsylvania conference, Kitty Carlisle (Dec. 1977, p. 593)—met in nearly all of the states and many U.S. territories in preparation for WHCLIS.

Of course, nothing can go completely smoothly. Alabama librarians were miffed, and not without reason, when ALA moved its 1979 Midwinter Meeting out of Chicago due to Illinois' failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Midwinter moved to D.C. that year, but the date also switched, forcing a conflict with Alabama's WHCLIS preconference (Oct. 1978, p. 509). Leadership of the conference changed late in the planning process, when White House Conference Advisory Committee Chair Charles Benton clashed with NCLIS Executive Director Al Trezza, and named Marilyn Gell to replace him as WHCLIS chair. South Dakota, meanwhile, skipped WHCLIS altogether. "I seriously fear the White House conference will be a boondoggle with no effect," said South Dakota State Librarian Hershel V. Anderson (Oct. 1979, p. 525.). "I couldn't justify the $20,000–$25,000 cost to South Dakota."

And there was a bomb on a flight carrying 12 delegates and two AL editors to the conference—"An incendiary bomb which had filled the aircraft with smoke and forced an emergency landing at Dulles in the nick of time," wrote AL Editor Art Plotnik in a preliminary report. (Dec. 1979, p. 634).

WHCLIS passed 25 resolutions, seeking a national information policy ensuring full access to publicly funded information, access to library positions and boards for deaf and disabled people, expansion of books and documents available in a computer-processible form, a National Indian Omnibus Library Bill, and no-fee access to information in publicly supported libraries, among other topics. Detractors, however, were well-represented in AL's coverage. John L. Burch, a lay delegate from Kansas, derided the conference as "a catharsis for librarians." Ann Lynch, president-elect of the Nevada Parent-Teacher Association, was quoted in the Las Vegas Review Journal as being "lower than a snake's belly" over the passage of a resolution calling for federally mandated guidelines for a library in every school (Jan. 1980, p. 18). Even Plotnik, in his preliminary report, called the content of the conference "generally unexciting," although he said "the people and their passions made up for it."

But groups did take action. Indiana created a committee to implement resolutions from WHCLIS and the state preconference (Apr. 1980, p. 186). Two significant bills incorporating WHCLIS ideas were introduced in Congress that year, and an follow-up conference in Minneapolis Sept. 15–17 elected a steering committee to build a national lobbying framework and gain funds. That committee continued meeting and ultimately planned the second White House Conference on Library and Information Services, which took place July 9–13, 1991.

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant.

With the launch of our redesigned web site, American Libraries also introduced AL Focus, a new site for video content.

It's not, to be perfectly fair, an entirely new concept. We've done video before, most recently with 2002's Loss & Recovery: Librarians Bear Witness to September 11. It's not even our first attempt at a regular video series: That was Library Video Magazine.

LVM was produced from 1986 to 1990, but its story begins in 1983. A brief news story in the February issue (p. 105) announced the availability of "a pioneering 'ALA-TV Conference '83' telecast" for people unable to attend Annual. AL Editor Art Plotnik coordinated production of the program, a five-hour telecast of conference highlights and a live "bibliographic institute" with call-in questions, viewed by 2,500 people at about 120 sites around the United States and Canada. Appearing in the broadcast were library leaders such as Plotnik, Henriette Avram, Linda Crismond, and Peggy Barber, and celebrities like Ray Bradbury, Richard Attenborough, and LeVar Burton.

Despite the decent viewership, the telecast wasn't produced again in 1984. But it seems to have given Plotnik a taste for video. He served as executive producer of Library Video Magazine, debuting a pilot episode at Annual in 1986.

"We plan to travel throughout the U.S. to shoot stories that are fresh and of immediate interest to librarians," Plotnik said of the project in the September issue of American Libraries (p. 630). The first "issue" had segments on minicomputer staff training, the PLA national conference, optical disk technology at the Library of Congress, storage and circulation of compact discs, and preservation at Johns Hopkins University.

A one-year subscription to LVM, featuring four 25-minute issues (on VHS, Beta, or 3/4-inch format, if you care for a touch of nostalgia) was $199.95. During its run, the video series covered issues ranging from Los Angeles Public Library's recovery from fires, library public art controversies, male children's librarians, and the Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood archive at the University of Pittsburg.

Stills from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, as featured in Library Video Magazine.

Financial concerns, as they often do, dominated the late '80s and early '90s for the Association in general and ALA Publishing in particular. (Treasurer Carla Stoffle would, in her 1991 Midwinter report (Mar., p. 260), focus her ire on the Association's "troubling" slow growth at Publishing). In 1990, the Video and Special Projects Unit took responsibility for LVM from Publishing; the series published three times that year before folding. (V&SP itself dissolved in 1991.)

Today, of course, producing video is a far less taxing and expensive prospect. (Although Dan Kraus, the AL editor who's heading up AL Focus, has genuine filmmaking credibility, with a batch of feature-length films under his belt.) Precisely what path AL Focus takes remains to be seen, but it should at least be an interesting ride.

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant

The fact that predicting the future is a tricky proposition doesn't stop people from trying. It makes for good punditry, and by the time the future's arrived, most observers will have forgotten the prediction anyway.

Unless, of course, someone publishes them. Which American Libraries has, over the years—so let's review some excellent, and less so, predictions.

16-hour work week
In the March 1933 issue (p. 133), the Bulletin published a speech made by B. Lamar Johnson, librarian and dean of instruction at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, to "Normal School and Teachers College Librarians" at the Midwinter Meeting in December 1932, proposing increasing value for books once the Depression ended. After giving highlights of amazing accomplishments in industrial technology, he declared that "Technocrats suggest that this situation will soon result in conditions which will make it necessary for workers to labor only four hours a day for four days a week. Whether or not such a condition becomes a reality, certainly we can look forward to a civilization in which leisure time and consequently the use of books will play a part of increased importance."

So, a sixteen-hour work week? I wish. I'll give him partial credit for his thoughts on the increased focus on recreation, although most of that credit disappears for his failure to imagine that other forms of recreation might provide harsh competition.

Chicago Branch Plans
The February 1976 issue of American Libraries (pp. 95–96) reported on the opening of Chicago's Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, and reviewed the 1969 study by Lowell Martin, Library Response to Urban Change, that set out recommendations for the city's system.

Martin recommended a central library, ten large regional libraries, and many diversified "branch" programs throughout the cities. The article noted that those ten regional libraries were probably over-ambitious, "even for that healthier economic milieu."

Thirty-one years on, Chicago has just two regional libraries, rather than ten. It opened a central library in 1991 and has in the past two decades focused on building and renovating its network of neighborhood branches.

AACR3
At a LITA program at the 1979 Annual Conference (July/August, p. 413), panelists were asked for a prediction of publication of the 3rd edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. As depicted at right, Maurice Freedman predicted, Match Game-style, 1984, while others on the panel suggested "never."

While predicting can be precarious, the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules has announced an early 2009 release of RDA:Resource Description and Access to supercede AACR2.

Hypertext
At the 1987 Annual Conference (July/August, p. 558), LITA president Ray DeBuse declared that scientists would begin to use hypertext break through the limits of the printed page by the end of the decade. (AL's description of the idea: "You're at the beach browsing through something by Dostoevski on your reading machine when you remember there's a Cubs game going on. You watch an inning or so—on the same machine—then get back to Dostoevski. As you peruse the text, you call up a citation and a critical essay on the novel and check the translation of a Russian word—all on the same screen. You're using hypertext.")

Well, we still call them "computers," it took a couple extra years for the technology to integrate into American life, and I'm not sure how many people combine Dostoevski, the beach, and the Cubs, but overall this one's pretty close.

Economic Understanding
There's one final "prediction"—or more accurately, an implied prediction based on a grand misreading of the current situtation— that I'd like to share. It comes from Edward Eyre Hunt, secretary of the U.S. president's Committee on Recent Economic Changes, who commended Americans' ever-growing economic understanding, with the implication that it would lead to continued prosperity. "In the good old days, Wall Street would never have heard of an article in the Atlantic Monthly by a Harvard professor. But only a few months ago an article by W.Z. Ripley upset the street and every broker and runner had to read that article. And what has been going on in the financial district appears to have been going on throughout the country.

This, I suggest, is a new thing in America and it is to be attributed at least in part to the persistent efforts of the President to educate all of us to think in economic terms."

Lovers of irony may be able to guess that the U.S. president was Herbert Hoover, and Hunt's speech was made May 13, 1929, at the Annual Conference in Washington D.C., less than six months before the stock market crash kick-started the Great Depression, and published in the August conference proceedings (p. 245).

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant

I've got a few quickies for today. More in-depth postings will return once the crush of deadlines for the June-July issue (incidentally, our official Centennial issue) is past.

More on Rossell
This information comes from Mary Miller of the ALA Archives at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. A circa-1960 biography on Beatrice Sawyer Rossell, the first named editor of the Bulletin of the American Library Assocation, reported that she studied at the New York State Library School and began her library work in Albany, New York. After serving as editor of the Bulletin and head of public relations for the ALA, she became the first official lobbyist for the Illinois Library Association. She also worked for 10 years as a library consultant for Field Enterprises, and as librarian at Way County Library in Petersburg, Ohio. By 1962, she was living in Phoenix, as evidenced by a letter she wrote to Carl Milam, former ALA secretary.

Early Photos

In an earlier post, I noted that I thought a photo of Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the January 1923 issue was the first picture published in the magazine.

Missed it by, well, 14 years.

I've since found pictures from the September 1909 issue. And the auspicious subject of those first photos?

Paper.

See, at the fifth general session of the 1909 Annual Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, one Cedric Chivers presented a paper titled "The Paper and Binding of Lending Library Books." Accompanying the published report were several photomicrographs of paper.

Two pairs of photomicrographs appear at right. The top set shows the transverse (above) and surface section of a "close, heavy, moderately calendered paper" praised for its close fibers and small air space." The bottom, however, shows the transverse and surface sections of a "thick, bulky, feather-weight antique." So if your paper looks like the one on the bottom, you know you've got problems.

But enough facetiousness; bookbinding was a highly visible issue in the Bulletin's early days, with an ALA Committee on Bookbinding whose reports regularly appeared in the magazine's pages.

Not-so-early photos

Apropos of nothing except historical interest, I'd like to share this photo of current ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels (with Madison, Wisconsin, librarian Faith Miracle) from the November 1985 issue. It was taken at the sixth annual meeting of the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services Taskforce September 12-14, 1985, in Princeton, N.J.; Fiels was at the time with the New Jersey State Library.

WHCLIS and WHCLIS II were also big events in their day, and their appearances in American Libraries will certainly be the topic of an upcoming post.

Finally...

Happy Bike-to-Work week! The cover of the September 1976 issue featured David P. Jensen, director of library services at Greensboro (N.C.) College, who biked 675 miles to ALA's Centennial Conference Fair in Chicago. I'd hoped to also include a photo of my bike—a delightful alternative to the trains here in Chicago—but a breakdown on Monday and the unlikelihood of being able to repair it before the weekend prevent that. Feh.

—Greg Landgraf, Editorial Assistant, American Libraries