If you folks can believe this, a resolution to rescind the ALA motto was defeated. The Pleistocenes on Council reared their heads and noticed that Janet Swan Hill (who received my vote for EB) had proposed we finally kill this tagline, first introduced when Benjamin Harrison was president: “The best reading, for the largest number, at the least cost.”
Posted on this day, other years:
- 2008: FRL's Index - 2009
- Away, Away to ALA - 2005
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Karen,
Surely you meant that a Committee on Potential Task Forces to Consider Organizational Mottoes was needed, so that Council could then work with a report on the advisability of convening such a task force, which could then…
[Sorry. The echoes of various attempts to simplify ALA Annual, or perhaps COPES with it, still resound through the large empty spaces in my skull.]
Ok, now you’ve piqued my curiosity. Did JSH propose an alternate motto, or just the elimination of the existing motto? And what is it about Judy Jetson that would make her take a different position on a motto than, say, Wilma Flintstone? As I recall (though even as a child I avoided the Hannah-Barbera cartoons), the Jetsons may have lived in a more technologically advanced society than the Flintstones, but they were technology’s passive recipients, and no more capable of sound thinking than the Flintstones.
She proposed elimination of the existing motto; I suggested half-facetiously that we create a Motto Task Force, but Council was determined not to change. Personally, I’d rather have no motto than a dumb motto.
Yes, no motto is better than a dumb motto. I’m reminded of a quip that goes something like, “better to say nothing and have people think you are stupid than to speak up and have them know it for a certainty.” I’m also reminded how difficult it is to convince groups to change.