The Association maintains a close working relationship with more than 70 other library associations in the United States, Canada, and other countries, and it works closely with many other organizations concerned with education, research, cultural development, recreation, and public service. The mission of the American Library Association is to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all. The American Library Association is committed to protecting public access to information in all forms and to ensuring that library users in the 21st century enjoy the same free and open access to information that they do today. It has been the position of the ALA, throughout my thirty-year tenure as Director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, that libraries may select for their collections any work they may legally acquire or, in other words, any work not previously and finally declared by a court of law to be obscene or otherwise not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Those policies extend to information available through electronic means.
Internet access is essential to enable libraries to fulfill their historic mission.
For years, libraries have aspired to the goal of providing information from all viewpoints and on all subjects. Limited by budget, space, and distance, few, if any, attained this goal. The Internet now provides a previously unavailable universe of information to even the smallest, poorest, most remote library and to the people it serves. It has become the single most important tool for effective delivery of library services in our time, and will only grow in importance as more and more resources become available only electronically. A library without Internet access, or whose access is filtered by some third party, will be unable to fulfill its obligation to its community.