American Libraries

Susan Schnuer: I’d like to welcome you to The International Relations Round Table Reception. And if I may say so, it's one of ALA's best receptions.

Deanna Marcum: On behalf of the Library of Congress, I'm really thrilled to welcome you here. Although we service the National Library, we take great pride in our international collections. Sixty percent of the collections of the Library of Congress are in languages other than English, so we serve a very diverse population.

Loriene Roy: Good evening, boozhoo. I want everyone to say "boozhoo." (Boozhoo) So you just told me "hello" in my native language—in Ojibwa language. Bievenidos a todos a ALA. Next year our initiatives will include both an indigenous presence and an international presence, so we welcome you. Have a wonderful conference.

Mallikarjun Angadi: It's wonderful to be here as an ALA member. And I'm very happy that I have a membership to ALA. And I would like to participate myself actively in ALA activities. And now I'm a member of IRRT. So I'm already meeting with the different people with the IRRT activities and how I can actively participate in that. Maybe I'll go back to India and I'll be in touch with the people who are participating in IRRT.

Senele Gonzalez: I did short stint volunteering in Nicaragua at their university lending library and so I was just really curious to see what else was going on there. So I did visit, I think, a new discussion group on international public libraries. And I have joined IRRT as well and also the New Members Round Table. So I'm just getting my feel to see what's out there.

Robert P. Cook: Well, I think that having a joint conference is a really good start. Maybe that sort of thing should be done, maybe every ten years, have a joint conference. It needn't be ALA coming to Canada, it could be CLA coming to the United States. One area that I'm quite interested in is cataloging; that's my immediate area of responsibility. I've attended a few of the sessions and I think a lot of more work has been done with introducing Web 2.0 into cataloging operations, things on wikis and social taggings and this kind of stuff. I don't think we've done as much of that in Canada. I actually feel I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Snejana Ianeva: You may have heard we've had a very interesting project: The American-Bulgarian Libraries Exchange for the public libraries, accepting a new philosophy of the library as a public information center. So this is something that Bulgarian Public Libraries are very much interested in. But also we do like your advocacy campaigns because in Bulgaria we really very much need advocacy and we read a lot of about that. And in fact, following the U.S. experience the last year, we did the first National Library Week and Legislative Day, and that was great.