Children & Libraries

Children & Libraries getting it right Virginia A. Walter AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION Chicago 2001 While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information appearing in this book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or reliability of the information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in this publication. Cover and text design: Dianne M. Rooney Composition by ALA Editions in Caxton and Kabel using QuarkXpress 4.1 for a Macintosh Printed on 50-pound white offset, a pH-neutral stock, and bound in 10-point coated cover stock by McNaughton & Gunn The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ' Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walter, Virginia A. Children and libraries : getting it right / Virginia A. Walter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8389-0795-4 1. Children’s libraries—United States. 2. Young adults’ libraries—United States. 3. Public libraries—United States. 4. Children’s librarians—United States. 5. Young adult services librarians—United States. I. Title. Z718.2.U6 W35 2000 027.62'5—dc21 00-057600 Copyright © 2001 by the American Library Association. All rights reserved except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Printed in the United States of America. 0504030201 54321 Contents Introduction v 1 Where We Came From: The Tradition of Public Library Service to Children 1 2 Where We Are Today: Contemporary Public Library Service to Children 17 3 Warning Signs 38 4 The Changing Lives of Children 48 5 Emerging Trends in Library Services to Children 78 6 Future Libraries and Future Kids: Some Alternative Visions 91 7 Getting It Right 107 Afterword: Five Laws of Children’s Librarianship 123 Appendix Competencies for Librarians Serving Children in Public Libraries 125 References 131 Index 149 iii Introduction I SPENT THE LAST SIX MONTHS of the twentieth century writing this book. It was an interesting time for someone to be thinking about the fragile connections between children and libraries in our country. During the second week in August, a man who had been active in white supremacist activities shot several children in a Jewish community center in Los Angeles. He said he wanted to give America a wakeup call to kill Jews. Earlier in the summer, a man drove his car into a southern California day care center where his ex-girlfriend used to work, killing two children. And the families in Littleton, Colorado, got ready for a new school year. The library at the Columbine High School, where two teenagers had turned their guns on their classmates the previous spring, was hidden from view by a new wall of blue lockers. The House of Representatives attached a rider to a juvenile justice bill that would require that libraries receiving the special e-rate for telecommuni- cations purposes use filtering software. In conferences and on electronic discussion lists, librarians debated about the reported inaccuracies of a historical novel about a girl in an Indian board- ing school and the ethics of buying the British edition of the popular Harry Potter books in order to put them into the hands of their rabid young American fans before the American edition was published. Young children were obsessed with Pokemon, playing the Nintendo games and collecting and trading the cards that featured the cute little Japanese cartoon “pocket monsters.” On Thanksgiving Day, a six-year-old boy named Elian Gonzalez was plucked from the ocean sixty miles off of Florida. His mother had embarked from Cuba with a small group of refugees in a rickety boat that tore apart in the rough seas. Only Elian and one other woman survived. The best interests of this little boy would become submerged in a battle between the estranged v vi | Introduction Cuban and American sides of his family as he was held up as a symbol of resistance for political activists in both Cuba and the United States. The Kansas Board of Education voted to discourage the teaching of evolu- tion in the state’s classrooms and eliminated the Big Bang from the science cur- riculum altogether, on the grounds that these two phenomena are only theories. Closer to home, my grandchildren continued on their separate paths toward literacy. Eight-year-old Vivian was racing through the Harry Potter books along with most of the rest of the kids in this country who read for pleasure. Four-year-old Nadia had learned to “read” David Shannon’s “No, David!” (1998) after dozens of repeated readings by her mother, her father, her sister, her grandmother, and anybody else she could cajole. Baby Natasha started her subscription to Baby Bug and showed a marked preference for the picture of the butterfly in Tana Hoban’s Black on White (1993). As I sit at my computer at home, I can see photos of those three much- loved little girls, the treasures of my heart, as well as a picture I cut from a Smithsonian magazine that shows two itinerant musicians, a father and son, sitting by a country road in India, dressed in radiant shades of orange and gold. They are both beaming with pleasure as the man teaches the small boy how to play the beautiful stringed instrument that will be his one day. I keep this picture to remind me of the pleasure of intergenerational connections and to remind me of my responsibility to all children, not just those I know and love. Suzanne Morse (1998), the executive director of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, tells about a greeting used by Masai warriors in Africa: “How are the children?” The traditional response is, “All the children are well.” My first and strongest motivation in writing this book is my conviction that all the children are not well. I am heartsick at the violence that pervades this country and the terrible harm it is doing to all our children. I am angry that children go homeless and hungry and without adequate medical care in the richest country in the world. I worry about the children who are growing up without basic literacy skills and those who are growing up without expo- sure to books and ideas that will nourish them and give them dreams. I worry about the children who spend too many hours in front of computer and tele- vision screens, and I worry about the children who never have the chance to use a computer at all. I am convinced that as a nation we are failing our children. I would save them all if I could. I would fix the broken schools and families, the juvenile justice system, and the health care system. I would create communities where Introduction | vii children were cherished for who they are and what they contribute to the world now, not just for the money they spend, the votes they can generate, or the adults they will someday be. For now, I am engaged in a more modest mission, but an important one. I want to fix our libraries. They are not all hopelessly broken. Many of them are glorious kid spaces where children are respected and nurtured. But the needs are so great, and our potential is so strong. We can do it better. We can get it right in every community, for every child. This is not a how-to-do-it book. It is more of a how-to-think-about-it book. I was influenced initially by Walt Crawford and Michael Gorman’s Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness, and Reality (1995). As Crawford and Gorman reflected on possible future scenarios, they found it helpful to look back to the historical foundations of the library as an institution and librarianship as a profession. One product of their reconsideration of libraries’ traditions was the formulation of a new set of laws of library science, based on the clas- sic laws set forth by Ranganathan in 1931. Here is the new formulation: Libraries serve humanity. Respect all forms by which knowledge is communicated. Use technology intelligently to enhance service. Protect free access to knowledge. Honor the past and create the future (Crawford and Gorman 1995, 8). Like Crawford and Gorman, I have found it useful to look at the past in order to speculate about the future. In the early days of the American Library Association, the conference proceedings were published nearly verbatim. I could almost hear the voices of the women who spoke with such eloquence about tenement children whose squalid lives would be enriched through read- ing, about the rural children who needed better access to books, and about the new specialists in children’s library services who were working to meet those needs. In this book, I have tried to honor that past while I think about creating the future. Chapter 1 is a descriptive and evaluative look at the history of library services to children in the United States. Chapter 2 assesses the cur- rent status of children’s library services. Chapter 3 looks at some warning signs and trouble spots in contemporary library service to children. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which children’s lives are changing, creating new viii | Introduction opportunities and challenges for the librarians who serve them. Chapter 5 looks at emerging trends in library services that indicate positive responses to changes in children’s lives.

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