I've written a lot in this blog about the process of writing. Today I want to shift gears and write about content. I am deep into chapter 2 of The Book, in which I reconsider the legacy of library services to children. I needed some kind of organizing principle to do this, and I settled on the identification of three sets of principles or themes.
The first set of five principles are the values and ideas that have come down through more than a hundred years of library service to children. I proposed that these principles are:
1. Reading good books contributes to a good life.
2. The individual child is the primary user of children's library services.
3. The library's children's room is an important element in promoting reading.
4. Children's librarians are the appropriate specialists to best deliver library service to children.
5. Children's librarians are advocates for library service to children.
The second set of principles has emerged more recently:
1. Libraries provide children with information as well as pleasure reading.
2. Library service to children can be optimized through partnerships and collaborations.
And finally I consider two principles that have waxed and waned over the years as social conditions and perceptions of the role of the library have changed:
1. Library use is a civic activity.
2. Americans and American libraries have a responsibility to look beyond their borders and to adopt a global perspective.
So far this works. It is a useful framework and encompasses much of what I want to say. I'm a little puzzled about where to put storytelling; that may end up back in the first set or principles.
I have written before that writing often helps me to clarify what I think or know or believe. Writing this chapter, I have been surprised at how filled with admiration and respect I am for the founding mothers of children's librarianship. Before I began, I expected to be more critical. I had thought to take the position that our legacy was an albatross around the neck of the profession, dragging us down and preventing innovation. I don't believe that any longer. Frances Jenkins Olcott, Anne Carroll Moore, and the other women who were creating -- and implementing -- a vision of library service for children more than a hundred years ago have handed down some timeless truths that together form a solid foundation for the work we do today.
And this brings me back to the business of writing. We only know what they thought and tried to do because they wrote about it in books and magazines that are available to us today through the wonders of interlibrary loan. I wonder if one hundred years from now some children's services coordinator or library educator will be looking back on MY words and reconsidering the legacy of twenty-first century children's librarianship. What a responsibility!
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3 comments:
Very eloquent, Ginny. The principles provide a solid framework, and I'm glad you'll fit in storytelling and the oral tradition somewhere. It seems to me that the (world) folk tradition is handed down, in many cases, ONLY through the public library and storytime.
Susan Patron
Do you think that storytelling is important enough to the legacy to merit its own principle? Something like: "Storytelling is a core element in library service to children."
Well, that's tricky because some children's librarians do not enjoy it or do it well. I see it as an artform. Very good librarians who cannot or wish not to learn storytelling can be very successful by reading from folk literature and/or contemporary literature in storytime. What about couching it as "story sharing" or "storytime"?
Susan Patron
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