I really thought I was done with Chapter 1, the history and tradition of library service to children in the U.S. I had tracked down those pesky PLA service responses and navigated through the controversy surrounding the Benton Foundation report. I had integrated Abigail Van Slyck's insights on the children's rooms in Carnegie libraries and Jacalyn Eddy's account of the influential "bookwomen" who helped to create children's book publishing and library services in the first part of this century. Enough!
Then the discussion lists started to buzz with news of a New Yorker article about Anne Carroll Moore. Is there anything more to be learned about this formidable foremother of library services to children?
What I really want to read is an article about a children's librarian serving the kids in Topeka, Kansas, in the 1920s or working in a segregated library in the South in the 1950s. Or the memoir of a new children's librarian terrorized by the indomitable ACM. I want to know what the children's librarians in Minneapolis or San Francisco thought about Stuart Little; I really don't care any more that ACM was disappointed in it. I want to know how children responded to those legendary story hours at NYPL back in the early days. I want to know what children checked out from branch libraries in Los Angeles and New Orleans at different periods in time. I know that summer reading programs have been around since about 1900. What were they like? When did themes and tangible reading incentives become part of the programs?
So much of what we know about library history is the story of great women. Where are the "little women?" Where are the children?
3 comments:
Yes, this would be a fabulous historical study. If it were me, I'd probably go back to some of the early SLJs to see if there are articles by some the less well-known children's librarians re: the topics you mention. You may not want to fool with this now, but it would certainly be an interesting independent study for a student. From my own historical research on public libraries in Calif, I know there was no summer reading program in San Bernardino county, for instance, until WWII. Surely this must have been the case in other libraries across the country.
Actually, there are documented summer reading programs as far back as 1905, but I suspect you're right that they weren't ubiquitous until after WWII. It appears that many of the "extra" services and programs beyond reference and readers' advisory really took off then, helped in some cases by the passage of LSTA in the 1950s.
But you're right. I don't want to do this research. I want to read somebody else's research!
Hi Ginny,
Glad you have finished historical and agree that we don't know so much about children, average librarian and special issues of particular regions and decades. I don't think this lack of knowledge will make a difference in the value of your book. The point of this chapter is to set the stage for thinking about what we are doing today to "get it right."
While I was walking this morning (beware I will be hitting you up for Breast Cancer 3 Day walk soon), I was thinking about "reclaiming" the future. A phrase came to my mind, "Something old, something new, something borrowed and something new."
I think that the "old" will be the special bond between adult and child, child and story, and the freedom of calling the shots on learning what interests you.
I think borrowed will always refer to solid professionals who replicate what innovators are doing.
And I think that 50% of the future is new. I have always thanked Helen Mullen of the Free Library of Philadelphia who advised me not to get too bogged down in research (old or borrowed) and use what I knew to create services that were relevant to the community. Very liberating and practical at the same time.
Sorry to be so wordy, but I am captured by the value of your work and want to tell you the best is waiting for the right moment of reflection. I must end by giving you a poem written by Alberto Rios for the Phoenix Public Library Foundation.
Knowledge Neighbors
You and I, my friend, we lend what we have to each other,
Hand-saws and tree pruners, cars sometimes and sugar.
But we lend as well to each other what we know--The Library,
It tends our voices--it speaks for us in words so many as the stars,
All to make sanes of the world and the worlds we share.
The new century is its newest book, and this book is our lives.
It is our own chance to be new, to be surprised, to see what it is
We are all going to do. Today, we lend ourselves to each other.
Our big hands to the small hands of the mighty race of children,
Our big words to their small syllables, our ideas awaiting theirs.
This book of ours together has not ending written for it yet.
Its stories have unfamiliar faces, but not unfamiliar hopes.
It is a book of many colors with a binding stitched from dream.
When we enter a library, we open first the page of imagination,
The last page of memory, and the webpage of today.
Tomorrow's page has not been printed, and may not be--
Perhaps it will be made of flying things, pages that come to us
Like bird wings through the air. This page might we anything.
However it makes itself, however we read, or hear, or taste it,
Let us think that it will be good, because we are good.
Elaine
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