What Every Librarian Should Know about the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Abstract

To establish a clear and comprehen sive prohibition of chscrirnination on the basis of disability, President George Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law on Jury 26, 1990. Also cited as Public Law 101-336, the is considered by many to be the most significant civil rights legislation passed by the federal government since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The prom ises to reshape virtually every aspect of our society by making discrimination against Americans with disabilities illegal in both the public and private sectors. So far, the library profession has been slow to respond to the enactment of this legislation, portions of which become ef fective Jan. 26, 1992. There have been a few initiatives, among them an ADA and Libraries information brochure from ALA's Association of Specialized and Co operative Library Agencies (ASCLA); a program at ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta sponsored by ASCLA's Decade of the Disabled Committee; and, for ALA's 1992 San Francisco conference, both an ASCLA preconference and a program sponsored by its Blind and Physically Handicapped Forum. But these noble ef forts will likely be too little, too late. Access for all. Intellectual freedom. Bal anced collections. Literacy. The freedom to read. As a profession, we embrace these ideas and presume to lecture others on their importance, while systematically de

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.