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