WHCLIS II: A delegate’s perspective
Katherine F. Mawdsley · College & Research Libraries News · 1991
Back at work in late July after a week as a professional delegate to the second White House Conference on Library and Information Services (WHCLIS), I initially relied on facile answers to the recurrent questions: What was it like?Exhausting, stimulating, frustrating, incredibly, if not impossi bly, compressed; a case study in organizational behavior and decision-making.But I met some wonderful people, and I'm glad I was there.Will it do any good?It could.Much will depend on how the report presents the recommendations and how constituencies mobilize afterward to shape and pursue the issues.We were told repeatedly that WHCLIS was intended to be "a process, not an event," and the wisdom of the aphorism became increasingly clear.No one asked me, "Was it relevant to aca demic libraries?"That question has an easy an swer, too: Absolutely!After some time spent not thinking about WHCLIS, the opportunity to review the recom mendations in the draft final report was most en couraging.It reinforced and confirmed my sense that there was a remarkable degree of shared pur pose and cohesion among the delegates.From an amazing and exhilarating variety of perspectives and backgrounds, almost 700 delegates and 1,000 other participants grappled with issues and labored to refine and articulate concepts originally expressed in over 700 ways.Out of a seemingly impossible morass, a number of themes emerged with clarity and importance as the week went on.The process was enhanced by preliminary state ments and background material many professional organizations, including ACRL, had prepared.Sev eral of the resolutions on major topic areas quickly found strong support because they were embodied in carefully phrased proposed resolutions brought to the conference by well-prepared delegates.The resolution that drew the greatest number of votes in a ballot to choose the 15 issues of greatest interest