11.05.08
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.
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11.04.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:16 pm by Leonard Kniffel
I arrived at the polls this morning at 6:50 a.m. There were 50 people in line ahead of me. I live in one of those Chicago neighborhoods that over the last dozen years has seen an exodus of mostly Latino residents and an influx of McMansion builders, yet we still vote at Christopher House, a 100-year-old community center that provides “integrated social, educational, and human services that help families thrive in an environment that nurtures and values diversity,” largely to a community that has been forced to move away because of yuppie development and accompanying property tax hikes.
Inside the voting place, the usual cadre of fussy election volunteers was lumbering through the motions of trying to move too many people to some eight badly lit porta-booths, where we used a felt-tipped “special pen” to mark our ballots before feeding them into a machine. Suddenly, one anxious woman pulled herself out of line and addressed the rest of us. “Voters, voters, um, um,” she stammered, “my daughter has a test at eight o’clock. Does anyone object if I go to the front of the line?” I wanted to tell her that my job at the American Library Association, waiting for me at 8:30, was every bit as important as her daughter’s test. But I didn’t; no one else said anything either. Instead, I amused myself by wondering at the contrast between this over-eager mother and the antiquated voting system I was about to use.
So here I am at work now, trying to complete an article for the December issue of American Libraries that sums up Laura Bush’s eight years as the librarian in the White House. We’ve been told that we can leave work early today to avoid the traffic and congestion that is likely to ensue once the Barack Obama camp starts gathering in Grant Park to learn the election results. But I don’t want to avoid the crowd; I plan to get lost in it and begin here and now to plan for ALA’s engagement with the new administration, whatever the outcome.
Emily Sheketoff of the ALA Washington Office says, ““No matter who wins and no matter what happens in Congress, this is going to be a very tough year. It’s going to demand of library supporters that they pay attention and be very active in talking to their elected officials, both local and federal.” Indeed. ALA has recommended that Congress appropriate $100 million for libraries in stimulus funding, and the Washington office has briefed both presidential candidates’ staffers and talked to members of both the House and the Senate, but no matter what the outcome of the election, ALA must work across the aisle, and one of things I’ve learned during 20 years of observing ALA’s aisle-hopping is that there is no basis to the assumption of some that libraries fare better under a Democratic administration. It’s going to be a struggle, with a lot of unknowns ahead of us, especially when it comes to things like McMansion building and antiquated voting procedures.
What I do know is that at five o’clock this afternoon, I’m heading downtown to witness a historic moment, with an eye toward what this means for our profession and our Association. More later.
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10.15.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:21 pm by Leonard Kniffel
Brian Huddleston, senior reference librarian at Loyola University College of Law Library in New Orleans, contacted me this morning to say, “I guess one useful thing about a blog is that you can publish stuff that are only half-formed ideas because the campaign staff of certain big politicians never return your calls.” He was letting me know that he had posted to his blog an article (well, really a non-article) about the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain that he tried to write for American Libraries.
Huddleston pitched the idea to me months ago, saying, the basic question he would like to answer was, “Who does research for presidential campaigns?” A quick literature search had confirmed that nothing much had been written on this topic. “The hook for the article would be a scene from the 1992 documentary The War Room,” Huddleston said, “and if I could get a brief phone interview with someone in each campaign who did that sort of work, it would be a decent article.” I loved the idea and thought readers would too.
“But both campaigns blew me off,” Huddleston finally told me, “preferring to only deal with more ‘mainstream’ and ’serious’ media outlets like Blender magazine.” Reading Huddleston’s ”The Research and Information Needs of Presidential Campaigns; or, The Article that was Never to be Published” is an interesting look at how our profession is regarded by those who run the presidential election campaigns.
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