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I'm very happy to have this opportunity to wish all of you happy new year and to
offer information on where The American Library Association stands with
e-books and digital content.
I have had the great pleasure and privilege of working
with Molly Raphael,
the immediate past president and with Barb Stripling who will succeed me to
address the various issues around this topic. We've had a series of meetings
with publishers, we've begun to talk with authors and we have established ALA
as an important player in
addressing the various issues around the changes in the digital content
ecosystem.
This is an issue that is very important to me because it relates directly to the
work that we're doing
to strengthen our role in transforming communities
and as the people who live and work in our communities change in what they
read and how they read it, it's critically important for libraries and
librarians to be at the forefront of helping individuals come to terms with
what some of these changes will mean.
I also want to assure you that we're going to continue to provide leadership
in this arena, but we invite you to join us in this effort. And the first thing
that many of you can do is to participate in the various programs and
activities
at ALA's Midwinter meeting in Seattle.
I also want to remind everyone that American Libraries has this easy way to
keep up to date and that is the E-Content blog.
American Libraries also will publish the spring
a digital content supplement and I encourage you to read that.
We've also recently issued a communications toolkit that is designed
to help you, at the local level, communicate on these issues
and another thing that is in development that you will shortly see on the website
is a scorecard on business models
in the the digital content arena.
This is a very complex issue. It's a situation that calls for us to think
in new in different ways
about what it is that we deliver to our users
but also how it is that we deliver them. As self publishing grows there are likely
to be opportunities for us to support self publishing to perhaps even get our
libraries engaged in self publishing.
And, in closing, I want to just suggest
that this is a time of significant transformation
and that each of us should be taking advantage of every opportunity
to remind those with whom we work
in our communities that while
print is diminishing and there's an increase in desire for digital content
the role in the opportunity for the library to support reading, to support
discovery, to connect our
public with our readers
and with authors is critically important.
Thank you for listening and happy new year to all of you.
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