Welcome to the new millennium and the Libraries' new initiatives. Hopefully, the new year will bring us success and accomplishments as well as satisfaction, good health and happiness.
As we implement UniPrint and other new projects our patience and perseverance will be tested but we are on the right track. We continue to add new electronic databases to the collection and have just acquired access to several new databases including Science Direct, providing access to the full text of journals from Elsevier.
It is noteworthy that we have now added a total 163,647 government documents titles to the online catalog. Congratulations to Tyler Goldberg and the Content Access Team. Of course, much more work has do be done to add volumes and clean up records.
ALA Conference, January 2000
This month several UofL librarians were among the more than 13,000 attendees at the American Library Association Midwinter conference in San Antonio. President Sara Long's initiatives enabled 200 librarians from 10 countries in South and Central America to attend the ALA meeting to help us build international library communities. Several special programs were held for them and Luis Valdez, playwright/director and composer, presented a very inspirational keynote address at the President's program.
ALA completed a five-year strategic plan called ALAction 2005. It includes
ALA is cooperating with ALISE (Association of Library and Information Science Education) in helping to determine specific needs to be addressed by library and information science education. An ALA Task Force on Core Values and a Task Force on Core Competencies are in the process of establishing guidelines for future library education. I serve on the Core Competencies group.
During the ALA Conference the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) Board approved the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education and related outcome measures. The Standards can be read at www.ala.org/acrl/ilcomstan.html.
We will now work with our campus community to integrate information literacy into the undergraduate and graduate curricula.
The ACRL Board approved the "Intellectual Freedom Statement," an interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights.
ACRL selected three academic libraries for the Excellence in Academic Libraries Award. The winners were North Carolina State University, Wellesley College and the College of DuPage.
ALA also announced the winners of the prestigious children's book awards, Newbery, Caldecott and Batcheldor. Christopher P. Curtis won the Newbery Medal for his book Bud, Not Buddy. He also won the Coretta Scott King Award for his book. Simon Taback won the Caldecott Medal for his picture book Joseph Had a Little Overcoat. The Batchelder Award was presented to Anton Quintana for his book The Baboon King. This award honors the best children's book first published in a foreign language.
The ALA Council had a busy agenda as usual. Some of the highlights included topics related to socially responsible investing, subject headings revisions, requiring professional librarian credentials for top officials of ALA, and establishing an ALA Web Advisory Committee.
The ALA President-Elect Nancy Kranich has selected as her theme for 2000-2001 "Libraries Are the Cornerstone of Democracy." Included in this is the sub-theme of extending information literacy training to all types of libraries and building advocacy programs to support this. I am serving on a committee to help Nancy work on her programs related to these themes.
--Hannelore Rader, University Librarian