ALCTS Network News v13n05 (March 24, 1997) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/ann/ann-v13n05.txt ISSN: 1056-6694 ALCTS NETWORK NEWS An electronic publication of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services Volume 13, Number 5 March 24, 1997 In this issue ANNUAL CONFERENCE ALERT TWO TO RECEIVE ALCTS BLACKWELL AWARD BEST OF LRTS AWARD RECIPIENT NAMED SUPREME COURT HEARS CDA CHALLENGE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PUBLISHES USMARC CODE LIST FOR LANGUAGES JAPANESE PAPER CONSERVATION COURSE THIS WINTER ************ ANNUAL CONFERENCE ALERT Hotel rooms for the San Francisco Annual Conference are going fast. If you are attending conference and haven't yet made your reservations, you will need to do that soon. You will also want to watch for your April issue of American Libraries. It will contain the preliminary conference program -- the only preliminary program you will receive. It will also be on the Web (www.ala.org). ************ TWO TO RECEIVE ALCTS BLACKWELL AWARD Walt Crawford and Michael Gorman are the 1997 recipients of Blackwell's Scholarship Award presented by ALCTS. They received the award for their book Future Libraries: Dreams, Reality and Madness, published by ALA Editions, 1995. The award, a citation and $2,000 to the library school of their choice donated by Blackwell, is given to the authors of an outstanding monograph, published article or original paper on acquisitions, collection development or related areas of resource development. "The Crawford/Gorman book is provocative, uses statistics in a creative and compelling way, and articulates very clearly and passionately the tensions facing our library collection today," said Karen Schmidt, chair of the award committee. Crawford is manager and senior analyst for the Research Libraries Group. He is the founding editor of Information Standards Quarterly, and is the author of 13 books and more than 100 articles. Gorman is dean of libraries at California State University at Fresno. He is the author of several books and innumerable articles, and co-authored AACR2. The award will be presented on June 30, at 9:30 a.m. at the ALCTS Membership Meeting and Presidents Program during the ALA Annual Conference, June 26-July 3, in San Francisco. ************ BEST OF LRTS AWARD RECIPIENT NAMED Michael Kaplan is the 1997 recipient of the ALCTS Best of LRTS Award. The award, a citation, is given to the author of the best article published each year in Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS), the official ALCTS journal. Kaplan received the award for his article titled "Technical Services Workstations: A Review of the State of the Art." LRTS 40(2): 171-183. "Michael Kaplan's article highly merits this award for its neatly encapsulated treatment and analysis of the evolution of the technical service workstation, from 'dumb terminals' to sophisticated, multi-tasking environments," said Paula De Stefano, chair of the Best of LRTS Award Committee. Kaplan is head of database management and coordinator OCLC/RLIN operations at Harvard University Libraries. He has authored several articles on technical services workstations, and most recently served as editor for a book to be published in June 1997 by ALA Editions titled Planning and Implementing Technical Services Workstations. The award will be presented on Monday, June 30, at 9:30 during the ALCTS Membership Meeting and Presidents Program, at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco. ************ SUPREME COURT HEARS CDA CHALLENGE In a rare action reflecting the significance and complexity of the issue being heard, the Supreme Court allowed attorneys arguing the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) last week an additional 10 minutes to present their cases. Elizabeth Martinez, executive director of ALA, and Judith Krug, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, said they were impressed by the number of questions asked by the justices, many of which focused on the liability of parents for their children, and whether teenagers and adults who engage in online conversations of a sexual nature would be subject to prosecution. Martinez noted that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in particular, asked about the impact on public access to online catalogs and other information provided by libraries and the legal implications for libraries. "I'm optimistic the justices will act to uphold freedom of speech in cyberspace," Martinez said. Krug described the hearing as "awesome" and added, "It's not over yet. This case will set the standard against which other cases will be measured for the foreseeable future." Bruce Ennis, attorney for ALA and the Freedom to Read Foundation, represented the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a coalition of organizations challenging the law at the hearing held March 19. Ennis said he felt the case got a thorough and thoughtful hearing. "The Court seems to understand that the Internet is a unique medium and cannot be subject to the restrictions on speech which apply in mass media such as radio and television," Ennis said. In his arguments, Ennis focused on four points. He said the law, passed by Congress last year as part of the Telecommunications Act, violates the First Amendment right of free speech for adults by outlawing any material on the Internet that could be considered "indecent" or "patently offensive by community standards" for minors. He argued that the law would not effectively protect children since some 40 percent of indecent material originates in other countries and that there are less restrictive means of protecting children, including parental supervision and use of filtering devices. Ennis also charged that the vagueness of the law's wording, coupled with severe penalties, would undoubtedly have a chilling speech on speech that is not considered indecent under the law. Seth Waxman, a Justice Department attorney, argued that the law is necessary to protect children from inappropriate material available on some 8,000 sites. He claimed the Internet provides children "a free pass into the equivalent of every adult bookstore and every adult video store in the country." Under the Act, passed last year as part of the Telecommunications Act, any person who knowingly sends or displays "indecent" materials over the Internet to minors could be imprisoned for up to two years and fined up to $250,000. The Supreme Court case, titled Reno v. ACLU, combines suits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition, which includes the American Library Association as lead plaintiff and its sister organization, the Freedom To Read Foundation. Two federal district courts upheld the challenges and issued injunctions against its enforcement. The rulings were appealed by the U. S. Department of Justice. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision before its summer recess at the end of June. A transcript of the hearing is at http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/trial/sctran.html ************ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PUBLISHES USMARC CODE LIST FOR LANGUAGES The USMARC Code List for Languages, 1996 edition, is available from the Cataloging Distribution Service of the Library of Congress. It contains a list of languages and their associated three-character alphabetic codes that allow for the designation of the language or languages in USMARC records. There are codes for individual languages and language groups. This revision of the 1989 edition contains all valid code and code assignments as of October 1996. The revision in this edition include the addition of many languages that have been assigned group codes, new references and changes to reference and language names. In addition, 29 new language codes have been established. It also includes numerous references from unused to used forms of language names and from names of individual languages that are not given to discrete codes to the language group to which they are assigned. The list contains 400 discrete codes, of which 53 are used for groups of languages. Other changes in this edition are a result of the revision of the U.S. national language code standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.53, which was approved in September 1994. USMARC Code Lists for Languages, 1996, sells for $20 (North America) and $22 (elsewhere). ISBN: 0-84444-0936-7. 138 pages, softcover. Order from the Library of Congress, Customer Services Section, Cataloging Distribution Service, P. O. Box 75720, Washington, DC 20013-5720; phone 800/255-3666 or 202/707-6100; fax 202/707-1334. TDD 202/707-0012. Web address: http://www.loc.gov/cds/; e-mail cdsinfo@mail.loc.gov/. ************ JAPANESE PAPER CONSERVATION COURSE THIS WINTER ICCROM is sponsoring the Sixth International Course on Japanese Paper Conservation in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan, from November 20 to December 12, 1997. The working language of the course will be English, and the intended audience is up to 12 paper conservators/restorers working in museum collections, archives or libraries. The objective is to introduce participants to a variety of paper conservation techniques based on Japanese scroll mounting. The registration fee is $450. For more information contact ICCROM - Japanese Paper Conservation Course 97 at training@iccrom.org. ICCROM is the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, located at Via di San Michele, 13, Rome, Italy. ************ ALCTS NETWORK NEWS (ISSN 1056-6694) is published irregularly by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association. Editorial offices: ALCTS, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; Carol Chamberlain, President; Karen Muller, Executive Director. Editor: Karen Whittlesey (kwhittlesey@ala.org); Editorial Assistance: Karen Muller, Shonda Russell. ALCTS NETWORK NEWS is available free of charge and is available only in electronic form. Opinions expressed in the articles are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the division. News items should be sent to the editor at the e-mail address above. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to listproc@ala.org with the only line of text being "subscribe an2 [your name]" (without quotation marks). Back issues of AN2 are available through the listserver. To find out what's available, send the following command to listproc@ala.org: "index an2" (without quotation marks). Send questions about membership in ALCTS to the ALCTS Office, alcts@ala.org. All materials in the newsletter subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be reprinted or redistributed for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or education advancement. For other reprinting or redistribution or translations, address requests to the ALA Office of Rights and Permissions, 50 E. Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611. ************ an2 v13_no5