Posted in Uncategorized at 6:23 pm by Leonard Kniffel
I fell in love with StoryCorps back in 2005. “Listening is an act of love,” StoryCorps founder Dave Isay told me, so I listened as he explained how this national oral history phenomenon began in 2003 with a StoryBooth in New York City’s Grand Central Station, how it has grown, how the Library of Congress and National Public Radio got involved, and how he hoped libraries and librarians were going to play a huge role in bringing StoryCorps to the nation. “It is our intention,” he said, “that everybody has access to this and that everybody knows about it. I believe the best way to do that is through the library.”
Many of us inside ALA have been trying to help make that happen. Dave Isay was a speaker on the “Live! @ your library” Reading Stage during the ALA Annual Conference in 2007, and we continue to cook up more plans for working with StoryCorps to spread the word and maybe even get more librarian stories told. StoryCorps has become a life’s work for Isay, as it really should be for all of us. Libraries are about stories, not just the glamorous stories or the horrifying stories but all the individual stories that make up what we modestly refer to as the human record.
StoryCorps has declared November 28, the day after Thanksgiving, the first annual National Day of Listening. “This holiday season, ask the people around you about their lives,” StoryCorps is urging. “It could be your grandmother, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood. By listening to their stories, you will be telling them that they matter and they won’t ever be forgotten.”
As a librarian and a journalist, there is a part of me that wants to spend every moment preserving the moments that just passed. My impulse to record started when I was a teenager and I received a small, toylike reel-to-reel tape recorder for Christmas. I thought it was the greatest gift ever and promptly convinced my poor grandmother to sit for an interview. Mind you, this was a woman to whom a telephone was still a mysterious and fearsome object.
I recently thought about those early tapes and dug them out of an old trunk where they’ve been sitting for nearly a half a century and decided to listen to them. I dug out the old tape recorder, which was of course completely broken, and trotted off to a repair shop. They took one look at it and told me it could never be made to work again. They then played the tapes on their best high-sensitivity tape recorder. Sadly, they reported, no voice could be recovered.
But I didn’t give up. Through the Library of Congress, I located a service that was able to bring back the voices on those tapes and return them to me on a CD. The day they arrived, I fixed myself a cup of tea, and with a little trepidation, put the CD in the player, knowing that I was going to hear my grandmother’s voice again for the first time since her death in 1972. Nothing quite prepared me for the shock—the shock of how young she sounded when she had seemed so old to me then, how her thick Polish accent was just as I remembered it, how sweet her voice was, as if it were coming from heaven itself instead of from this technological marvel. It made me sad, not because I was hearing her voice again but because I could not hear more, because I had recorded and saved only a few short minutes of listening.
Now please listen to this: The day after Thanksgiving is the perfect day for us all to grab a few of those technological marvels we have all over the house and sit down with someone we love and ask those questions the answers to which may live in our hearts for as long as we are alive. During the hubbub of Thanksgiving dinner it’s fine to send that video camera madly panning across the room while people make silly faces, but the next day, when you are alone with someone you love, give this National Day of Listening a try. As StoryCorps advises, “It may be the most meaningful time you spend this year.”
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:00 pm by Leonard Kniffel
The last panel discussion at the Traditional Cultural Expression Conference in Washington, D.C., addressed “Emergent Technologies, Emergent Cultures: The Interface of Technology with Traditional Cultural Expression.”
“How is knowledge embodied in media?” asked Ramesh Srinivasan, assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. He advocates for a hip-hop model or any number of other modern interpretations of traditional culture, along with new methods of organization and access. Does that mean we reject cataloging and classification? No, he said, but it argues for including “the narrative associated with an object,” leading to collaborative methods, research done with people not on or about them. He called for flexible, practical models that involve people in all phases of a project.
Greg Younging, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, talked about indigenous use of technology. “I come from a traditional family,” he said, ”which also went through the educational system that uprooted children and put them in residential schools.” He is the first member of his family that didn’t go through that system. “I don’t have my language,” he said, “and I had to discover the traditions for myself.” One of misconceptions he pointed to is the notion is that “authentic” or “traditional” means “being exactly what we were when we first encountered Europeans, hunting buffalo and living in teepees.” Using technology does not amount to abandoning tradition, Younging maintained. Technology belonged to indigenous people too; witness mound building, long houses, the pyramids. Mound building was such an ancient technology that it had stopped even before Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. ”Modern technology is a tool that people can adapt to their cultures, not something with intrinsic power,” he said. “We can indigenize anything.” Oral history, and the need to pass it from generation to generation, is a validation of the need to preserve history—the principal not the means.
Eric Kansa, of the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley asked why it is that scholarship, supported with public money, is limited to one community. Because “we are in a restrictive publishing paradigm,” he answered, calling for “common ground in the digital commons.” Why can’t this discussion be more widely available and participatory, he asked, instead of locked behind subscription barriers. Kansa suggested an alternative to intellectual property protection in libraries could be “our own mark, like the copyright symbol, that is mark of respect.” He also warned against letting Google become “a giant Hoover of content.”
The Traditional Cultural Expression Conference ended with a free-wheeling wrap-up led by Jonathan Franklin of the Gallagher Law Library, Janice Pilch of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Lori Driscoll of the University of Florida Smathers Libraries. The trio will be the library liaisons to WIPO, and they collected recommendations from the participants that will further the American Library Association’s primary purpose in holding the three-day invitational: “to define the U.S library position on cultural expression.”
Respect, reciprocity, responsibility, collaboration, self-determination, and openness, need to be among the principles that guide library and archival preservation of traditional cultural expression, with a focus on the “human value” libraries can bring to the WIPO table. Several participants confirmed the sense that there is a difference between the general protection of traditional cultural expression and the intellectual property rights of indigenous people who believe in collective ownership in perpetuity. Libraries need to focus on the latter, in relation to WIPO, and to stand behind the U.N. Declaration of the Human Rights of Indigenous People.
Conference organizer Carrie Russell, of the sponsoring ALA Office for Information Technology Policy, said the group’s recommendations will be organized and posted to the conference website for further development. And she thanked the MacArthur Foundation for funding the Traditional Cultural Expression Conference.
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:23 pm by Leonard Kniffel
A panel titled “Drawbacks to Traditional Copyright Protections and Alternative Models” delivered perhaps the most empassioned talks of the Traditional Cultural Expression Conference in Washington, D.C.
Debra Harry, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism pulled no punches as she emphasized that indigenous people must be consulted at the onset and throughout any effort to manage or preserve their cultural heritage. She looked around the room and observed that not enough idigenous people were present at the conference.
Trying to twist western intellectual property laws to fit indigenous expression is futile, Harry suggested, as it protects “alienable commodities.” Indigenous people have a completely different view. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) refers to it as the conceptual divide. Indigenous people view their cultural expression as holistic and dynamic, with collective rights that are unalienable, intergenerational, and perpetual, with a foundation in human rights law or the right of self-determination. The Western view is that intellectual property rights are alienable or a commodity that we think of as needing short-term protection and public domain provisions founded in trade agreements. Indigenous peoples are rights-holders not stake-holders, Harry said. When it belongs to indigenous communities, she observed, it no longer has its real value when used by outsiders. Librarians need to rely on the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, asserting the right of self-determination, she recommended.
Rebecca Tsosie, professor of law at Arizona State University, said the human race is “at time when we have to embrace change and do it by talking to people not like us.” Indigenous people are always compared to Europeans, she asserted, since “contact” it has always been this way. The difference now is that indigenous people have a political status, unlike the period of colonization when there was a presumption that indigenous people had no laws, no status. “We have sui generis laws,” Tsosie said, but until that statute there was no protection. She emphasized, as did Harry, consultation with native people, who look at cultural heritage collectively. ”It’s the right thing to do,” she said, especially with regard to all the cultural heritage and artifacts that have already been taken away from their rightful owners. ”Tribal and indigenous people are not at the table in the international sphere, and they should be,” she added. The U.N. Declaration says indigenous people have the right to self determination and contains model for defining native rights within domestic structures.
Wednesday evening keynote speaker Wend Wendland of WIPO rose to the challenge presented earlier in the conference by Winston Tabb of Johns Hopkins University. In attempting to answer Tabb’s challenge with regard to what the profession wants to see happen, he said that the library community could do two main things: 1) see to what extent your resources and technology and expertise could be made available to indeigenous people so they can document their own culture, and 2) develop a framework or protocol that can serve as guidelines. He acknowledged the need to consult widely, and to observe and participate in a wide variety of projects. He invited the American Library Association and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions to help develop a guidebook for libraries. It’s not that indigenous people want to be included in the existing system, he added, it is that they want a distinctly different one. But the agenda of the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore is overloaded, he said, and need to focus squarely on intellectual property.
It was at this point in the conference that it became clear to many that the discussion had veered away from the general concept of traditional cultural expression, which is way too inclusive. It was only when the group got into issues specific to indigenous populations that the question was understandably framed. Similar concerns apply to native people in Australia and New Zealand and other places around the world, just as much as North America.
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:20 pm by Leonard Kniffel
“Challenges to Libraries and Archives in the Management of Works of Indigenous Communities” was the theme of the fourth panel at the Traditional Cultural Expression Conference in Washington, D.C.
Kimberly A. Christen, associate professor at Washington State University, explained access parameters in tagging for databases, to illustrate collaborative management of indigenous materials, that is, matching access to user profiles that honors indigenous people’s wishes. Communities can do this now, without the law, she said, citing examples from Australia, where there is a strong movement afoot to preserve and collect indigenous knowledge. She also talked about “reciprocal curation” and announced that a Plateau Peoples Web Portal is launching in 2009, containing stories from the Coeur d’Alene, Umatilla, and Yakama peoples. We are “moving toward models that work in a more balanced way,” she said.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress began in 1928, said Michael Taft, head of the archive, and it started by attempting to collect all American folk music. All the material is openly accessible and no one has objected in 80 years, he said, adding that he did not expect that to last. He noted that no one can copy material without going through protocol, and LC views itself not as copyright owner but rather custodian. The Center has in some instances tried to repatriate recordings to tribal owners. Taft talked about the Zuni storytelling collection, which was deteriorating by the 1990s. The Zuni community blessed turning the collection over to LC in 1996, and the library is planning to make it entirely available to the Zuni community while preserving it at the Library of Congress. Yet, there remains the question of who the tribe deems eligible to access the tapes, he added.
“There has probably never been a more interesting time to be an archivist,” said Robert Leopold, director of the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Speaking about ethical issues surrounding the acquisition and curation of indigenous materials, he talked about the slippery slope of restricted access when donor language specifies, for example, only “genuine scholars” need apply, which requires “archival clairvoyance,” Leopold quipped. He said that protecting traditional cultural expression requires “strengthening trust in what are already some of the most trusted institutions in America.”
Christen observed that a lot of people object when they hear that certain things are only for women, only for men, but these restrictions consitutue, in library lingo, a knowledge management system.
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:59 pm by Leonard Kniffel
“Indigenous Perspectives on Intellectual/Cultural Property Rights and Access” was the theme of the third panel at the Traditional Cultural Expression Conference in Washington, D.C., featuring three speakers who represented native people from the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. The panel followed a luncheon talk by Peter Jaszi, law professor and director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic in the Washington College of Law at American University. A self-described intellectual property skeptic, Jaszi said the main function of intellectual property law has become to preserve the old business models and generate profit, and this constitutes a perversion of its original intent, which was to foster creativity and enable people to earn a living from their work.
It struck some at the conference as ironic that now, just when disenfranchised people are lobbying for a piece of the action, the legal establishment is saying the system isn’t working. Jaszi’s point, however, was that we need to examine what can be done to protect traditional cultural expression. He told a story about some surprising findings in Indonesia where traditional music protection has clashed with young musicians who want to play interpretations or variations on the traditonal, a conflict that ended up being echoed by many of the speakers at the conference. “A minimalist approach is best calculated to avoid the pathologies of intellectual property,” Jaszi said. He was told repeatedly by idigenous people with whom he had worked that “the law stuff is not what they need; they need real support now.” That translates into government ensuring better exposure in the media and in schools and supporting local revitalization projects, including performance spaces, and finding ways of connecting arts communities with discerning consumers. Jaszi’s talk led to an interesting discussion—with no general agreement—about the offensiveness of the updating being done by young people when they leave the indigenous community and reinterpret the traditional in the context of the contemporary.
Loriene Roy, immediate past president of the American Library Association and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, joked with the group about cultural blunders by talking about her own Anishinabe heritage and some of the gaffes she herself has made while learning about it. Roy is currently working with PBS on We Shall Remain, scheduled to air on public television in April 2009, on developing a multimedia toolkit to help libraries use the American Experience series to establish native history as an essential part of American history.
New Zealander Spencer Lilley, Maori services manager for the Massey University Library System, began his talk with an ancient Maori chant, leading into a discussion of Maori cultural and intellectual property rights. He presented a brief history of New Zealand and showed examples of Maori tattoos being used in fashion marketing and in sporting events in ways that native people find offensive and exploitative.
Martin Nakata, chair of Australian indigenous education at the University of Technology in Sydney, reported on his research on indigenous knowledge in Australia. He pointed out that 40,000 to 60,000 years of knowledge being passed on through oral tradition is not to be interpreted as entertainment. He offered an off-the-cuff, spot-on answer to the question, What does it mean to be indigenous? “We didn’t name the place, the place named us,” he said.
Michael S. Shapiro, of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, talked about the basic attributes of folklore, namely that it is: passed from generation to generation, community oriented, not attributable to individual authors, and continually used in the community. Copyright, he said, has been not been well suited to protect it.
Jamie Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, introduced the concept of sui generis, a legal term that describes ownership of a unique class of intellectual property rights. He observed that WIPO wants to move from philosophical debate about copyright and trademark to evidence-based economic discussion. He cited way the music business is structured as an example of how the system has deteriorated to allow a handful of people get the great bulk of the money.
Preston Hardison, Watershed Policy Analyst for the Tulalip Tribes in Washington State, described native attitudes toward intellectual property as “stewardship.” Native people see themselves as custodians of their traditions, not individual owners. “Indigenous systems of thought are very different,” he said. “Rocks are alive; it’s a different ways of thinking about the world.” Indigenous people are a separate object of international law, he explained, noting that there are over 10,000 indigenous groups in the world. “I don’t like having to talk law,” he said, but “if you can’t talk the legalese you are at a disadvantage.”
The speakers pointed out that one of the major complications when it comes to protecting traditional cultural expression is the influence of outside cultures on an indigenous culture—and vice versa.
Winston Tabb of Johns Hopkins University, a longtime library representative in international dialogue, was one of the conference participants, and during the second panel, he asked the group to consider that the major questions that needs to be answered in order to formulate a U.S. library position on the protection of traditional cultural expression are: What needs to happen? And, is WIPO the right place for it to happen?
The group was beginning to grapple with the unique situation of indigenous peoples, as opposed to the general concept of traditional cultural expression, and to recognize that this poses a set of issues that developed over thousands of years. Using copyright logic on indigenous culture is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole, as one participant observed.
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:09 pm by Leonard Kniffel
The Traditional Cultural Expression Conference settled into an intensive series of panel discussions on its second day, November 13, at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., and the participants learned that the American Library Association’s primary purpose in holding the three-day invitational event was “to define the U.S library position on cultural expression.”
The first panel of speakers began the definition by examining “The Nature of Traditional Cultural Expression: Legal and Ethical Issues,” and offering illustrations of real-life dilemmas that can beset libraries and archives when it comes to copyright.
Michael Taft of the Library of Congress emphasized that scholars and archivists need to be a presence in the international arena. He talked about LC’s American Folklife Center, which includes the largest collection of Native American ethnographic field recordings. He noted that in 2002, Folklife Center Director Peggy Bulger began attending World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meetings and found librarians were simply not represented in the discussions. Taft raised a number of questions related to folk art. Who retains rights if, for example, an Inuit healer moves to Kansas and is no longer a member of the indigenous community? Or, the Cambodian example, where the ruling regime attempted to wipe out certain cultural traditions, forcing performers who maintained them to do so outside the country’s boarders. How do intellectual property rights apply to tradition bearers living in a diaspora? He raised other questions about “cultural robbery”: the fact that Korea is applying for ownership of Feng Shui, generally known to have originated in China, and the fact that others have tried to claim the steel pan, an instrument created in the 1940s in Trinidad. “This is the kind of debate raised at WIPO,” said Taft.
Taft also emphasized the difficulty in establishing what traditions are community-owned. For example, some creators of the famous Gee’s Bend quilts filed lawsuits claiming that the man who brought them to the attention of the larger world, Matt Arnett, was not the owner of the designs, despite the fact that he had marketed them and greatly increased their value. “This kind of complication worldwide boggles the mind,” Taft said, and it parallels the growth of trade and technology. Folk music is largely thought to be in the public domain, he observed, but he then played a recording by popular singer Moby that turned out to be a cover of a recording from the Alan Lomax archive of a woman named Vera Hall, whom he recorded in the 1930s. Taft also played the Hall song, and they were virtually identical, minus the contemprary orchestration. Moby had thought the song in public domain but agreed to pay royalties once it was pointed out that it was not.
Kay Mathiesen, of the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona, talked about some the ethical concepts surrounding access to and preservation of indigenous intellectual property in the historical context of colonialism, dispossession, and the forced assimilate of native people while their culture was appropriated.
Mathiesen pointed out that differing world views lead to conflicting values over consititutional rights and human rights, and a tension with intellectual freedom as the core value of librarians. We live in a pluralistic society but overlapping consensus is possible, she said. “An atheist and a believer might both believe in separation of church and state,” she noted. “Different beliefs overlap on principle. Listen and understand. Not necessarily agree. Listen more, talk less,” she advised.
Justifications for limitations on intellectual freedom rights, so dear to librarians, Mathiesen said, can include: intellectual property and copyright, secrecy (trade secrets, state secrets), harmful material (child pornography), and privacy (medical records, reading records). She asked the group to examine how this applies to indigenous cultures’ rights. “Offensiveness” is difficult to add to the list, she said, if no harm can be demonstrated.
During the discussion, it struck this observer that part of what makes the conversation about traditional cultural expression, so complx is that terms like “intellectual property,” “copyright,” “trade secrets,” and even “pornography,” represent contemporary concepts that cannot simply be pasted over traditions and practices that predate them by thousands of years. And the presumed superiority of the conquerer over the conquered, the colonizer over the colonized, that has dominated library, archive, and museum development is not sustainable.
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:27 pm by Leonard Kniffel
Wend Wendland of WIPO
It doesn’t take long before a dinner table conversation about “traditional cultural expression” gets into some really heavy stuff. That’s what happened last night, November 12, when I sat at the table in Washington, D.C., with Wend Wendland, head of the Traditional Creativity, Cultural Expressions, and Cultural Heritage Section of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), who’d come all the way from Geneva to deliver the keynote address at a small invitational conference sponsored by the Office for Information Technology Policy of ALA’s Washington Office. Before you could say “copyright,” we’d leaped from folk art to questions about who owns the rights to ancient human remains and to a definition of “genetic resources” (biological material that contains units of heredity).
I wondered, can this group of about 50 professionals (much less the world), ever reach agreement about what constitutes offensive, much less who has the right to prohibit that which offends. These decisions are up to individual nations, Wendland said, because WIPO, of course, has no legal jurisdiction. It can only frame the issues and try to bring countries to consensus.
Carrie Russell, of the ALA Washington Office, pointed out that Digital Millennial Copyright Act wasn’t getting anywhere in the U.S.—until it went to WIPO, where it passed, she said. “Then, the U.S. was interested.”
The Traditional Cultural Expression Conference came out of the need to address international copyright issues, Russell said. “Our objective is to get librarians involved in WIPO.”
Wendland explained how collections of indigenous knowledge raise special concerns for librarians. Some groups reject the concept of public domain, he said. But librarians, archivists, and indigenous people can form partnerships, he added, that are sensitive to traditions and art forms that go back thousands of years and take into consideration where such issues as protocol, privacy, blasphemy, and heresy enter the discussion.
Today the real discussion began as we moved into sessions ranging from “The Nature of Traditional Cultural Expression” to “Challenges to Libraries and Archives in the Management of Works of Indigenous Communities.”
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:40 pm by Greg Landgraf
The final bit of coverage (on this blog, at least) of GLLS 08: The video. The full interview list:
Lawrence Kutner, Center for Mental Health and Media, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital (keynote: “Grand Theft Childhood? Real Data on Violent Video Games and Youth”)
Seann Dikkers, University of Wisconsin-Madison Games Learning Society Group (presentation: “Building After School Game Clubs Using Total War”)
Lindsey Wesson, Tennessee State Library and Archives (presentation: “Turning Gamers into Readers: What Wii Can Do”)
Amanda Lenhart, Pew/Internet Life (keynote: “Teens, Video Games, and Civics: What the Research is Telling Us”)
Rick Bolton, Library Mini-Golf (host, “Golfing through the Stacks”)
Larry Lewis Jr., Flying Blind LLC (presenation: “Integrating Non-Visual Access into a Library’s Gaming Experience”)
Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor District Library (presentation: “Pokemon Primer”)
But if you prefer to watch just for the somewhat metaphysical song about gaming performed within a game, I won’t be offended.
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:07 am by Leonard Kniffel
Posted on the ALA Council electronic list this morning by Councilor Marilyn Hinshaw of Oklahoma: “I am so grateful to the program planners who brought President-elect Obama to ALA in the recent past. Whoever it was/whoever you are, thank you, thank you! That program makes it possible for us who attended to say we were there witnessing a historic event in the making, at the beginning of a historic time for our nation.”
In the elevator on my way up to the office this morning, I ran into Deidre Ross, and before I’d even read Hinshaw’s posting, I thanked Ross for whatever she did as head of ALA Conference Services to bring Obama to the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in 2005, when his campaign for the presidency was in its infancy. Deidre isn’t often at the receiving end of praise for ALA conferences; rather, she is more often the recipient of complaints about what went wrong or what ought to have been done. I know, because I’ve sometimes been the messenger. But in 2005, Ross’s prescience led to one of the most rousing Opening General Session speeches I have ever heard. So library-specific, so tailor-made for librarians it was, that we were able to work with Obama to adapt it into the cover story for the August 2005 issue of American Libraries. I was also able to chat with Obama briefly in the Green Room before his speech, and the resultant interview was published in that same issue.
In his speech and in the article, Obama said, “More than a building that houses books and data, the library represents a window to a larger world, the place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward and the human story forward.” I remember having a hard time trying to cut the speech, so carefully crafted it was, and so we ended up running it pretty much in its entirety. “That’s what libraries are about. At the moment that we persuade a child, any child to cross that threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better,” Obama said. “It’s an enormous force for good.”
I was there last night in Grant Park, “witnessing a historic event in the making,” as Marilyn Hinshaw puts it. I was one of the quarter million people who wanted to be there, on the spot where Obama would be, to see what America would do at this historic juncture. To the extent that my cell phone would work, I was also in touch with friends from Michigan, Maryland, and Texas wished they could be there, to cheer and to walk proudly down Michigan Avenue, mingling with thousands of smiling Chicagoans who seemed to understand the challenges ahead for the first African-American president of the United States of America. There was no rowdiness, no hostility. And there was no booing when John McCain gave his gracious concession speech. It was a proud moment.
This morning, I pulled all the August 2005 issues of American Libraries and set them aside. I’m going to frame one, and use the rest to help Deidre Ross and the Conference Services office do whatever we need to do to make sure Barack and Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and the other Chicagoans who helped the president-elect make history last night be sure they understand that we want them with us next summer when ALA gathers again in Chicago.
