By GUY LAMOLINARA
The 1998 Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association (ALA) was a chance for the Library to showcase in one place initiatives that had previously been on exhibit separately.
On Jan. 10-12, in New Orleans, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped joined with the rest of the Library in a single exhibition booth. New furniture was built -- media-demonstration tables and a literature display tower -- and staff of NLS manned their stations to educate attendees on the services NLS provides persons with disabilities through its library affiliates across the country.
Attendance at this midwinter meeting was lower than at the Washington midwinter in 1996, and the general feeling of those working in the Library's booth as well as at the booths of other exhibitors was that traffic was slow. Perhaps the diversions of New Orleans proved too much of a lure for conventiongoers.
Nevertheless, the Library offered attendees demonstrations of its National Digital Library Program, including the American Memory collections; of the online catalogs; of products from the Cataloging Distribution Service; and of equipment offered by NLS. Also present were staff of the Center for the Book, who discussed the center's reading and literacy programs, and staff of the sales shops, who sold Library and related merchandise. Information from the U.S. Copyright Office was also available, as were copies of the December/January issue of the magazine of the Library, Civilization, which featured a story about the Titanic.
Another distraction for attendees on the exhibit floor was the "entertainment" offered by some of the vendors (the Library's booth was situated between a vendor who offered an Elvis imitator -- with seven performances a day -- and a juggling act, also performing several times daily).
The new booth configuration (and larger size, to make room for NLS) in some way provided a warm-up to the next ALA meeting, to be held in Washington this summer. Not only will the Library exhibit in the Washington Convention Center, it will also host the All-Conference Reception in the Great Hall. Although the Library hosted this reception the last time the ALA meeting was held in Washington, in February 1997, in many ways that experience served only as a dry run for the Annual Convention, which typically draws many thousands more people.
The Library will also host many programs, as it did last February, when attendees were treated to tours of the Digital Library Visitors' Center, special presentations of significant materials from the Library's collections and tours of the newly restored Jefferson Building, among others.
Announcements of Library events held in conjunction with the Annual Convention of ALA will be published in the LC Information Bulletin and available on the Library's Web site as soon as details are finalized.