Each issue of American Libraries, like any magazine, is a product of its time. Even if you took out easy identification clues like dates and page design, with a bit of examination you could still group issues together by their time period.

Some years are easier than others, however. 1994's issues, for example, are striking for their use of the term "Information Superhighway" or close variants. ("N.Y. librarians fight to direct traffic on the info highway"; "Pac Bell's $100K gift paves the info highway on-ramp in Calif."; "At Senate hearing, librarians seek their place on the information highway"; "First bumper sticker on the Infobahn?"; etc.)

Ah, the nostalgia of it: the Mosaic web browser had just been released, popularizing the the World Wide Web amongst a still-technophobic public. To ease the transition, someone comes up with a catchy metaphor: "It's like a superhighway. For information." Before long, someone comes up with the quip, "I feel like roadkill on the information superhighway," and the term joins '80s hair on the list of embarrassing things that seemed to make sense at the time.

More dramatic (and dire) are the issues from the first half of 1947. That was the year that the Bulletin heralded, with great trepidation, the Atomic Age.

The tone was dark from the beginning, with the January issue's announcement of the theme of the Annual Conference, as determined at Midwinter: "A Moratorium on Trivia." (p. 19) Also at Midwinter, Council passed a resolution urging all libraries "to advance a true understanding on the part of all the people of atomic energy and its meaning for civilization", and that the ALA urge international control over atomic energy.

In several news stories, the Bulletin reported on an atomic energy education program developed by the ALA and Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore (or, perhaps, developed by EPFL with some aid from ALA; reports aren't consistent on that point) and presented at libraries around the country (Jan., p. 38, 53). It featured films and lectures with titles such as "While Time Remains", "One World or None", and "Don't Resign from the Human Race."

Major speeches at both Midwinter and Annual addressed the topic. In "Atomic Energy and Your Future," (p. 71-74) J.J. Nickson of Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago and Harrison S. Brown of the University of Chicago laid out three grim facts about the Bomb: there's no secret in how to make it, there's no defense, and there's no monopoly in the ability to make one. Their proposed solutions to the problem of nuclear war: Disperse cities into areas of not more than 100,000 people each (at an estimated cost of more than $200 billion and the suspension of the Bill of Rights), the maintenance of the military at wartime levels at all times (making nuclear war almost a foregone conclusion) or the elimination of sovereign nations and the establishment of a functioning world government (the only solution the speakers suggested was viable.)

At Annual, Joel H. Hildebrand, dean of the Graduate School of the University of California, gave an even less pleasant speech (Sep. 1, p. 273), basically reviewing a number of strategies for controlling atomic weapons—and then explaining why each wouldn't work.

But there was some hope expressed amidst the doom. In his April "Notes from the Corner Office," (p. 99) ALA Executive Secretary Carl H. Milam reported on Enoch Pratt's atomic energy education program with admiration: "It was based on four facts, or, if you like, assumptions: 1) Intelligent management of atomic energy is vital to the preservation of peace and the promotion of the public welfare. 2) The people of the U.S. and the world have it in their power—as never before—to decide how much management and control, and what kind, are desirable and necessary. 3) People should have informed opinions before they speak their minds. 4) The library, as a public institution for public enlightenment, can and should do something about it." His column was accompanied by a letter from journalist Leland Stowe, who spoke at the Baltimore program, that was even more complimentary of librarians and their role: "One of its aspects which cheers me mightily is this: Baltimore's answer to a crying nationwide need was born in a public library. ... The librarians and libraries of America can be, and should be, the Paul Reveres of 1947."

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

Cover of the October 1991 issue, which covered the Soviet coup d'etat that took place while IFLA held its conference in Moscow.

“Lucky” is probably not a word most people would use to describe being trapped in Moscow during a violent coup d’etat, but the small band of librarians who stayed behind during the IFLA conference in August of 1991, while the airports closed and tanks rolled into the city, will never forget what we saw. To help me remember, I have the photographs I took of soldiers, barricades around the Russian parliament, and burned-out buses where three protestors died confronting a tank. Some of those pictures are still hanging in my living room. Most of them never got into American Libraries. But it was certainly as close to hard news reporting as I ever got, and I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for it.

Sixteen years after the fact, those of us who witnessed the failed attempt by hard-line Soviet officials to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office still think of those bizarre days every time we see one another. Most of us believe that it was indeed a privilege to have been witnesses to those historic events. Several Russian librarians told me long after the fact that it was the foreign librarians’ determination to stay in Moscow that permitted them to resist the coup, publishing leaflets and participating in the demonstrations under the guise of innocently attending a library conference. The photograph American Libraries ended up using on the October cover did, in fact, show some of those leaflets being distributed during the coup.

The photo that blocked CNN.

There was a moment behind one of the photographs that I will never forget. I had pushed my way closer to one of the tanks, which was surrounded by young men, several of whom were trying to persuade a soldier to shift his loyalties from the coup plotters to Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. I was taking my sweet time, trying to get the soldier’s face in the frame, trying with an amateur’s enthusiasm to shoot faces instead of the backs of heads. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me say, in perfect English, “Are you finished?” I turned around to see a CNN cameraman waiting impatiently for me to get out of the way. I slinked off. But there were dozens of other photo-ops that day; the next thing I knew I was photographing a young Russian planting a flag on a tank that had come over to Yeltsin’s side.

I don’t think the severity of the situation we were witnessing really hit most of us until we got back to the United States and saw what it looked like through the CNN lens. It still seems to me that the coverage in American Libraries doesn’t come close to conveying what I had seen, and neither of those photos appeared in the magazine. After all, we didn’t have the page budget for it, and I had already overspent my film budget.

I look back on that time now and take some satisfaction in knowing that I brought back a fascinating story, but I also look back with some regret that I did not have the wherewithal to call the New York Times right then and there. While the coverage of the coup was extensive and dramatic in the American press, pretty much none of it bothered to mention the role that librarians had played.

—Leonard Kniffel, Editor in Chief, American Libraries

See page 2 of this post for more photos from Moscow that were not published in the magazine.

Pages: 1 2

Something a bit lighter today: A sampling of some of the amusing and interesting photos that have run in American Libraries. Enjoy!

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant.

The cover of the January 1923 issue of the ALA Bulletin, featuring what I believe to be the magazine's first photograph: a landscape of Hot Springs, Arkansas, site of that year's Annual Conference.	Alice McKinley of DuPage at the Illinois Library Association's Bicentennial Ball December 5, 1975. From the January 1976 issue, pg. 16.
Library staff at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma, during Renaissance Open House Week in 1991. From the December 1991 issue, pg. 1,059.	Barbara Toohey, reference librarian and "hug therapist" at Los Angeles Valley College. From the June 1980 issue, pg. 382.
The punchline of this cartoon published in the March, 1928, issue (pg. 52) is a play on the popular "Reading with a Purpose" series of educational books that ALA published at the time. It's not the first cartoon published in the magazine, but it's of modern interest because variants on the punchline still get submitted pretty regularly.	Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, at the kickoff ceremonies for the 1987 Year of the Reader in Illinois, held during Midwinter in Chicago. Her book picks: Bloodline and In Cold Blood. From the March 1987 issue, pg. 217.
My favorite cover so far, this ranch made with wires and a CD illustrated the "Automation Mavericks" theme of the April 1987 issue. I hope to steal the idea.	Barney the Dinosaur receives a Library Hero plaque from District of Columbia Public Library Director and ALA President Hardy Franklin and two-year-old patron Alexys Wright on April 20, 1994. (Barney-hating remains a valid hobby, however.) From the June 1994 issue, pg. 482.
The staff of American Libraries in old-timey newsroom attire, from the June 1976 "Who We Are" issue, pg. 387. From left: Mary Jane McKinven, Edith McCormick, John Wilkins, Art Plotnik, Barbara Jacobs, and Liz Mitchell.