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International Responsibilities Task Force of the American Library Association's Social Responsibilities Round Table |
Reports
At the ALA Midwinter meeting, the
IRTF finalized program plans
for our Annual Conference in New Orleans.
Our program, which we will co-sponsor with PLG, will
be entitled “All
the News You Never Get: Breaking the International News Blockade.” The program will be held on Sunday, June 25,
2006
from 10:30-noon. We are still finalizing
plans for speakers, but the short list of speakers suggested include:
Lewis
Lapham, editor-in-chief of Harper’s; W. Leon Smith, editor-in-chief of
The Lone
Star Iconoclast; David Brock, a renowned conservative journalist who
eventually
changed his position and began writing materials that exposed the
conservative
media; Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica’s Democracy Now and Tom
Engelhardt, the
editor who runs the Nation’s Institute Tomdispatch.com. The speakers
will be
confirmed by the end of February. We also discussed how the task
forces will have to supplement
their budgets if they want to continue the level of programming that
has been
done at recent annual conferences. Now
that we no longer have the income from the Coretta Scott King Award
breakfast, the
task force was charged with finding ways to raise money.
Possible fundraisers include selling buttons,
or having some type of food event. We
also discussed the idea of selling postcards that featured libraries
from all
over the world. The entire task force
agreed that the latter idea would be an excellent fundraiser.
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