ALA and the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle

 

As I've written previously the American Library Association had a penchant for holding its conferences in conjunction with world fairs. It has also sponsored exhibits at other world fairs including the 1962 world's fair in Seattle, Washington. The official name for the 1962 fair was "The Century 21 Exposition" and ALA appropriately named its exhibit "Library-21". The exhibit was designed to highlight technology in the future of libraries, and it featured a state of the art Sperry-Rand Univac Computer. The exhibit ran from April 21 to October 21, 1962. I was prompted to do some Internet based research on the ALA exhibit after I added the microcard (shown above) produced by The Microcard Corportation to my librariana collection. A digital copy of an article about the exhibit in the ALA Bulletin for March, 1962 is available on the Seattle Public Library's website. ALA has a nice overview of the exhibit with some good links on its website. I was pleased to discover that ALA has added quite a bit of information about its history to its website. I have also put together a digital history of ALA on my Library History Buff website featuring items from my collection.