Program Picks & Pans

摘要

Despite concerns both physical and fiscal, the American Library Association (ALA) is going to Toronto to hold its annual conference jointly with the Canadian Library Association (CLA). While some librarians and vendors will stay home, fearing exposure to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), or because their budgets have been slashed, preliminary registration for the conference was running ahead of the last two meetings, in San Francisco (2001) and Atlanta (2002). Keith Fiels is now comfortably installed as ALA's executive director, and his first year was rife with challenges that would have cowed a weaker leader. Among them, ALA was hit for big bucks in the defense of intellectual freedom just as the ALA endowment languished in the bleak investment climate. ALA needs a successful conference in Toronto to stay in the black, or close to it.