“You are pioneers, and you are sending a signal to the world that says New Orleans is okay,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin told librarians at the opening session of the American Library Association’s June 22–28 Annual Conference in the Big Easy, the largest convention in the city since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the region in August and September 2005. With some 17,000 llibrarians streaming into New Orleans, the conference was an economic shot in the arm estimated at about $20 million.
Among the other major conference speakers were Laura Bush, Madeleine Albright, Cokie Roberts, and Anderson Cooper. Keynoting the Opening General Session, Albright congratulated librarians for keeping the faith with the people of New Orleans. She called libraries “the laboratory of freedom” and “the biggest bargain on the face of the earth.”
(Your librarian was there!)
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