About District Dispatch

District Dispatch is the official blog of the American Library Association’s Washington Office. If you want to know what’s going on in Washington from the library perspective, this is the one page you need to bookmark. Are you familiar with ALAWON – the ALA Washington Office Newsline? This is so much more!

The ALA Washington Office was established in 1945 to represent libraries on Capitol Hill, and now consists of the Office of Government Relations (OGR) and the Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP).

As part of the ALA Washington Office, OGR is charged with following and influencing legislation, policy and regulatory issues of importance to the library field and its publics. In coordination with its sister office, OITP, OGR works to ensure that libraries are consistently involved in the legislative and policy decision-making processes.

Meanwhile, OITP advances ALA’s public policy activities. It does this by helping secure information technology policies that support and encourage efforts of libraries to ensure access to electronic information resources, this as a means of upholding the public’s right to a free and open information society. OITP works to ensure a library voice in information policy debates and to promote full and equitable intellectual participation by the public.

To learn more, please visit the ALA Washington Office website.