Susan Waldon

Libraries have come a long way from the kind of subscription or social library that was the norm when the USA was new. Those libraries were only for those who contributed to them. Most of the time that meant that they were for wealthy white men. In 1854 the Boston public library, first tax supported public library in the United States, opened and began a trend that made public libraries an expected municipal service (Hirsh p. 72). Many libraries were segregated until the 1970’s when the ALA established an Office for Literacy and Outreach Services that focused on including underserved groups. The Library Services and Technology Act of 1996 established “information access through technology and information empowerment through special services” (Hirsh p. 73) as well as lifelong learning as vital parts of the public libraries’ mission. Since then public librarians have focused on how to serve all community members so that they have access to information in all formats and the tools and skills to use it so that they can make informed choices (agency) (Hirsh p. 6-7).

 

Access and agency for absolutely everyone are so central to librarianship today that we have at least touched on them in all my classes. Our textbook for the Foundations class had chapters on “Diversity, Cultures, and Equity of Access”, and “Teaching users: Information and Technology Literacy Instruction”. The emphasis on these things is rooted in the ideas that people can realize their dreams through self-education and that “Information literacy is a survival skill in the information age” (Hirsh p. 161). Librarians undertake everything that they do in the hope that they can help people thrive. We chose the best resources. We organize them so that they can be found. We plan buildings and furnishings and budgets and personnel. We learn the literatures for different age groups. We plan all kinds of programs. We teach technology. We form partnerships and collaborations. We dispense free teen bus passes and sometimes, in some places, Narcan. We do everything that we can think of to help the communities that use the library thrive.

 

Library administration and management are all tied up in how to use limited human, financial, and capital resources to best serve our communities, whose needs will always outstrip our resources. In LIS 610, Collection Management, I got two opportunities to think deeply about a hypothetical community and come up with a collection to serve them. The first was a discussion involving a hypothetical school librarian named Angie Sutton who had a chance to spend $4000 of grant money in an elementary school where most of the children were not yet reading on grade level. It was time consuming, but interesting, to research available resources and put together a memorandum on how that money could be used to help the school community improve student literacy. The other project was a collaborative project where our group came up with a hypothetical library and we each took a collection and made an annotated bibliography of 20 resources we would recommend buying for that collection in that community. My group based our library on the demographics of Siler City, NC which has a white minority. We called it the Similar City Library and we worked on getting more diverse resources into the children’s collections. I took youth nonfiction history and biography for my collection and concentrated on Hispanic American resources. The project gave me an opportunity to think deeply about a community and see how I could build a collection that could validate and inspire a group that was underrepresented in the library’s holdings.

 

 

 

 

 

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Another topic of interest to me in Collection Management was the use of patron driven acquisitions to make sure that users were able to access what they needed in the library. The library system for which I work is streamlining their process for patron driven acquisitions and I did a short writing project on patron driven acquisitions so that I could understand it better.

 

Since I am going to apply to be a children’s librarian in a public library, I took three classes aimed at meeting the needs of young people. In LIS 617, Children’s Materials, we learned about children’s development and needs and the various materials available for them. We got to design a book talk that would appeal to them and entice them to read a specific book. LIS 618, Materials for Adolescents, was a similar class aimed at materials for teens. In this class we learned about the needs of this population and did a book talk on three books. The theme of my talk was “Another World”.  LIS 663, Library Services for Young People, gave me the opportunity to learn more about children and teens and to design some programs for them. The ones that I found the most satisfying to design were a tween program about moon landings and  a program about job hunting basics for teens.

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Designing a program about job hunting reminded me just how important digital literacy is in today’s world for all of our communities. In LIS 688, Community Informatics, I am learning by reflection and volunteer experience about how to help people cross digital divides so that they can accomplish what they want and need to do. We see the need for this particularly around tax time in public libraries, as many people can not access and print off tax forms. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to practice helping people learn to use new technologies.

 

In his 2002 article, “A Community Mind”, David Carr examines the importance of cultural institutions like libraries and museums to the individuals around them. He says,

            “Unless an individual life has multiple opportunities to be rescued from banality

            and to be thoughtfully transformed by a library or a museum or a botanical garden

            or a planetarium---that is, by a collection of knowledge and experience, passionately

            gathered and thoughtfully constructed---unless this happens, an important failure of

            attention has occurred. And so our libraries and museums should be intentionally

            committed, dedicated by mission and service, to the construction of thinking lives

            and the illumination of thoughtful possibilities for those lives. These places are destined

            to be active and responsive forums, communicative institutions, not passive or reticent.

            A great cultural institution is a place of friction, heat, light, warmth, and the occasional flame”                          (Carr, p. 284).

 

It is a staggering and all-encompassing responsibility to try to make a place of warmth, light and learning for all the surrounding individuals and communities. It will take all the professional knowledge, dedication, experience, and creativity that we can continually bring to the task so that our libraries can truly make a positive difference in people’s lives.

 

References:

 

Carr, David. (2002). “A Community Mind.” Public Libraries. 41(5). September/October 2002. pp. 284-288.

 

Hirsh, Sandra. Ed. (2015). Information Services Today: An Introduction. New York: Rowan and Littlefield. Print.