20060413 - ALA PRESIDENT MICHAEL GORMAN SPEAKS AT NCCU

DURHAM, N.C. — For the first time, North Carolina Central University’s School of Library and Information Sciences (SLIS) is hosting the president of the American Library Association (ALA).

With more than 60,000 members, the ALA is the oldest and largest professional association in this field and determines accreditation for library school programs across the country. Controversial President Michael Gorman will speak on April 27, 2006 at 6:30 p.m. in the New School of Education auditorium.

With the closing of Atlanta University’s library school last year, NCCU remains the only Historically Black College or University with such a program. Given the tremendous lack of minority representation among library professionals, Gorman and the ALA are working to support NCCU’s bid to expand its program and to offer not only the master’s but also the doctorate degree.

NCCU’s dean of the school, Dr. Irene Owens, said, “I am grateful that Mr. Gorman is coming here. He is one of the most widely respected ALA presidents of the Information Age because he is willing to take a stand on controversial issues like the Patriot Act.”

Gorman has been an outspoken critic of the Patriot Act. He wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education dated November 11, 2005, “Librarians' opposition to the Patriot Act is not an attempt to strip law-enforcement agencies of their power to investigate crimes or terrorism; it is an effort to assure that the government does not have the power to monitor reading habits in secret.”

Gorman was called upon to step down even before he took office June 30, 2005, as a result of his personal but public stand against Google’s plans to digitize whole libraries including those at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. Google’s Print Library Project is intended to offer quick reference material to the masses or at least, the masses with access to computers.

Google plans to offer paragraphs rather than pages at a time from books that are still under copyright protection in response to key word queries. For those books no longer protected or more controversially, for those that are still protected but out of print, the Google user could conceivably download complete volumes.

In the December 17, 2004 issue of the Los Angeles Times, Gorman wrote, “When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from Page142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place.”

Gorman continued his argument in a Library Journal article issued on February 15, 2005, when he wrote, “The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.”

Gorman is not only a librarian but an author as well and may sympathize with those who are bringing suits against Google for copyright infringement. His seminal works on the technology of library science include editing the first and second editions of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules and the fourth edition of The Concise AACR2. Along with Walt Crawford, Gorman authored Future libraries: Dreams, Madness, and Reality and he is sole author of Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century. According to Owens, these latter two award-winning volumes are landmark textbooks in use in the curricula of higher education programs across the country. Gorman himself has served as dean of library services at California State University in Fresno since 1988.