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Goals and Activities of the American Indian Library Association (AILA)

 

The following list presents the AILA goals and activities in unranked order.

AILA:

  1. promotes the establishment, maintenance, and upgrading of Indian libraries on or near reservations and in other rural and urban areas;
  2. develops criteria and standards for Indian libraries, and works for their adoption by other associations and accrediting agencies;
  3. provides technical assistance to Indian tribes on the establishment and maintenance of archival services;
  4. builds support for the development of Indian information networks, facilitating the exchange of information among Indian tribes, and also among these groups and major institutions maintaining Indian archives;
  5. educates legislators, public officials, and the general public about the library/information needs of Indians communities;
  6. brings together those interested in Indian libraries and cultures at ALA conferences and other library and educational conferences;
  7. helps members of individual Indian communities to gain access to and use existing libraries to their best advantage;
  8. works to enhance the capability of libraries to assist tribes and individual Indian authors in writing tribal histories and other Indian-related works;
  9. encourages and helps to coordinate and plan the development of courses, workshops, institutes, and internships on Indian library services;
  10. develops grant proposals and conducts fund-raising activities to support these and other Indian library projects;
  11. helps develop awareness in the majority society that Indian people desire library information resources to help unlock their potential.

Excerpted from "Retaining Cultural Identity in a Transformed Future: The American Indian Library Association Response to ALA Goal 2000" by Loriene Roy. In Equal Voices Many Choices: Ethnic Library Organizations Respond to ALA's Goal 2000. American Library Association , 1997, pp. 23-24.

 

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Page prepared by Carolyn Jacobs
Student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas at Austin
June 25, 1998

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