The American Library Association elected UT School of Information professor Loriene Roy president for the 2007-2008 term. Roy received 65 percent of the vote and will be the first American Indian to serve as president of ALA.
Roy, who has been an ALA member for 25 years, will become president-elect in July and will serve as president from July 2007 to July 2008. As president, Roy said she will serve as a spokeswoman for the association and help advance the five initiatives of the ALA: equity of access, intellectual freedom, diversity, continuing and professional education, and 21st-century literacy. The ALA is the largest and oldest library association in the world.
"I'm sort of in a dream state because it actually happened, and it feels like my clock is already ticking on what I want to try to accomplish, but of course it's wonderful to receive the honors from that community," Roy said.
Roy's campaign focused on three platforms: supporting library and information science education through practice, supporting literacy in its many expressions - what she calls the "circle of literacy" - and workplace wellness, which she says is a new topic for ALA.
"Overlying all three of these areas, we're going to infuse the instruction with international and indigenous perspectives," she said.
Roy said serving as ALA president will not detract from her work in the School of Information.
"Being president of ALA is something you accomplish on top of all your other tasks. I'm scheduled for my regular coursework, and I still live here. It's really just bringing more to our students. I will be able to involve them in the highest level of the association," she said. "In many ways, by agreeing to do this, I recognize that it'll bring opportunities to our students and to the University."
Roy and Bill Crowe, director of the University of Kansas' Spencer Research Library, were announced as candidates Oct. 30. Roy said it was the third time the association invited her to run for president, and she decided to run because it would give her "an opportunity to promote library services to under-served populations and to extend the message of literacy to other communities."
Roy's campaign kicked off Dec. 9 when more than 50 of her supporters gathered to meet each other in the Carver Branch of the Austin Public Library.
In 1998, Roy founded If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything, a national reading club for American Indian children, through the UT School of Information. The program will add another school in August, she said, for a total of 26 sites in 10 states.
"She is very much about what people can do together as a community and how people can come together and bring their own culture, their own history and celebrate that as well," said Beth Hallmark, a library and information science graduate student who managed Roy's student-run campaign. "Culture is an important part of who she is."
Roy, an Anishinabe Indian, is enrolled on the White Earth Reservation and is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.
"She breaks the stereotype of what a librarian is," said Gustavo Soto, an information studies graduate student and Roy's campaign treasurer. "Dr. Roy is more focused on the bigger issue," he said.
Roy attended the Oregon Institute of Technology before earning her master's in library science from the University of Arizona and her Ph.D in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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