07.16.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:05 pm by Bev Goldberg
“God bless the [school] librarians who let me lay on my belly in the stacks and read and read and read,” acclaimed YA author Laurie Halse Anderson told an electrified capacity crowd at the American Association for School Librarians’ President’s Program, “Literacy Leadership and Librarian Flair.” Asserting that kids need school librarians more than ever, Anderson recounted the story of a 15-year-old boy who burst into tears in his school library one Friday after the media specialist said hello to him. As it turned out, the teen had been deliberately silent at school all week, waiting for someone to speak to him first and the librarian was the first person to do so. “You do the work of angels,” she concluded. “You save lives, you cherish souls, and you are laying the foundation that we are going to build the iteration of our country on top of.”
“Kids today are reading in spite of school, not because of it,” said Alan Sitomer, award-winning high school English teacher in inner-city Los Angeles and author of Homeboyz. He described himself as “personally on the receiving end of buffoonery” because his school “got rid of our school librarian two years ago and thinks content teachers can manage everything,” but that it’s impossible to conduct English classes without the support of “an intelligent librarian.”
Calling books a “sticky technology,” Sitomer got a huge laugh when he said that he can’t imagine reading Knuffle Bunny on a Kindle to his toddler. He said he started writing so young people like his students could find their lives in a book, and told attendees how he turned from remonstrating a student named Brijonea for being absent for two weeks to having her write down her story when she revealed had been shot in both legs and still had the bullet fragments. “She didn’t need makeup work. She needed therapy.”
“Why does Brijonea still come to school?” Sitomer asked. “She comes because of us, the people in this room.” Declaring that “there isn’t an adult in this room who hasn’t been kicked in the stomach by life,” he said children like Brijonea are the reason why librarians “can’t give up.”
“African Americans have never been afraid of change,” Newbery–award winner Jacqueline Woodson said. “We learn at a young age that the thing you have today you might not have tomorrow.” For Woodson, one constant is the physical book. “Each time there’s a one-on-one connection, it matters,” she declared, imploring librarians to “know your work makes a difference.”
Admitting that her first hardcover book was a volume of African-American poetry that she stole from the public library (and which her mother made her pay for), Woodson said that one of the poems in it affected her so deeply that it inspired her to write If I You Come Softly. “Literature has a way of resonating for young people,” she explained. Acknowledging the devastation that the economic crisis has wrought on school libraries, Woodson urged librarians not to get overwhelmed because “if we keep on doing the best we can, the rest will come.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 9:12 pm by Bev Goldberg
“Who Cares About Privacy?” was the title of a thoughtful program sponsored by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section of ALA’s Reference and User Services Association. It answered its own rhetorical question with a subtitle: “Boundaries, Millennials, and the MySpace Mindset.” Presenters Frances Jacobson Harris, author of I Found It on the Internet, and cultural historian Siva Vaidhyanathan were in full agreement, emphasizing that just because young people see privacy differently doesn’t mean that they don’t value it.
Dismissing the conventional wisdom that safety lies in shielding one’s full name and contact information, Harris declared, “Any nut is going to find you if they really want to, internet or not.” Explaining that the high school whose library she heads (University Laboratory HIgh School in Urbana, Illinois) publishes students’ first and last names in online articles, Harris contended that “Predators don’t typically troll for victims through social network services” and that the teens who engage in at-risk behavior online are the same young people who do so offline. Citing research indicating that adolescents can be mentored into better protecting themselves online, she expressed support for unfettered access in schools to instant messaging, Facebook, and email. “Kids use social networks to do homework,” Harris said, sharing one student’s anecdote about the four minutes it took him to go online, connect with a classmate who knew what tomorrow’s assignment was, and receive and print out an emailed scan of the teacher’s handout. Harris recommended that educators “look for ways to balance protecting privacy and fostering collaboration” online.
While supportive of what Harris had to say, Vaidhyanathan took issue with the premise of discussing millennials per se. “Generations don’t exist,” he declared, challenging attendees to come up with one adjective that would describe 10–20 young people in their lives. Redefining privacy as “not about hiding certain things about yourself but managing your reputation responsibly,” Vaidhyanathan went on to describe five privacy interfaces: peer to state (police, National Security Agency, government), peer to firm (the databases amassed by store discount cards, Google Book Search, etc.), peer to family, peer to peer, and peer to power (i.e., your school principal, employer, religious pastor).
Individuals juggle those interfaces in real life, but with the advent of social networks such as Facebook those spheres often collide, Vaidhyanathan pointed out, half-joking that his mother often “posts things on my Facebook that I have to delete.” What society needs, he said, are a few policy changes that protect people’s data. For one thing, Vaidhyanathan asserted, “Defaults should not be set to maximum visibility.” Noting that one in four Americans are born into poverty, he explained that poor young people “are less likely get why they should manage their public faces, their social reputations” when they don’t anticipate having opportunities in their futures that could hinge on such niceties. That’s why educators must teach responsible online behavior, so disadvantaged young people don’t unwittingly lock doors they didn’t think could open to them, he said.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 6:23 pm by Bev Goldberg
The proximity of Chicago to southern Wisconsin gave embattled officials of the West Bend Community Memorial Library, located some 40 miles northwest of Milwaukee, a platform to offer their hard-earned insights at “Intellectual Freedom on the Front Lines: West Bend Library Supporters Share their Story.” The program was cosponsored by ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation and Intellectual Freedom Committee.
Director Michael Tyree, Young Adult Librarian Kristin Pecoll, library board President Barbara Deters, and ousted trustee Mary Reilly-Kliss, as well as West Bend Parents for Free Speech founder Maria Hanrahan, told the complicated story of the library’s oft-stymied attempts since February to address a reconsideration request by area residents Ginny and Jim Maziarka. The problem, explained the panel, was that the nature of the couple’s challenge kept evolving: It began with a February 6 letter of concern in the library book drop about Pecoll’s “Over the Rainbow” link on the library’s YA page, and moved on to seek the removal and/or relocation of an expanding list of, at first, gay-positive titles and then any YA book containing sexual content.
Soon the city attorney was involved, mainstream press and blogs were weighing in. “How do you counter blogs with the facts?” Reilly-Kliss asked rhetorically, musing that “It never occurred to me that I’d be collateral damage” until she and three other library trustees recommended for reappointment were kicked off the board April 20 by the town council for not satisfying the Maziarkas. She characterized the prevailing viewpoint of the couple and their supporters as “If you listen to me, you agree with me and will do as I wish.”
“This was a public relations disaster,” admitted Deters, revealing that officials never thought to retain a PR adviser because the situation didn’t happen explosively, “but built, and built, and built.” West Bend staff and trustees were getting nasty emails, phone calls, and even accusatory comments at the grocery store even as Hanrahan’s advocacy efforts were beginning to lure freedom-to-read supporters into the open. Ultimately, the board voted 9–0 June 2 to maintain the collection exactly as it was—with young-adult materials clearly marked as such and shelved in a section geographically separated from both children’s and adult titles. Additionally, the library will add several reparative-therapy titles on becoming heterosexual that the couple had recommended.
Nonetheless, Tyree sees the subsequent weeks as more of a plateau than the end of library challenges. For one thing, Reilly-Kliss explained, the town council has declared the trustees’ replacements as being “more diverse” because none of them have degrees in education. Then there’s the matter of an unrelated civil complaint from four men in Wisconsin who belong to the Christian Civil Liberties Union and who seek $30,000 apiece for emotional distress they suffered from the West Bend library displaying a copy of Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop, as well as the book’s public burning outside the library.““Some organizations feel they have a lock on paying taxes,” Tyree observed.
As for Young Adult Librarian Pekoll, the Maziarkas’ challenge has prompted her to wonder whether the library community could preempt such complaints with workshops “about connecting to and talking with their teens” and using the library safely. She also noted that the era of librarian-authored content makes it advisable to devise a reconsideration procedure for challenges to homegrown web pages.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 3:21 pm by Pamela Goodes
Coretta Scott King Book Awards 40th Anniversary Poem
Chicago native and Black Entertainment Television Sunday Best finalist Shari Addison led a capacity crowd in “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” to begin the 40th Annual Coretta Scott King Book Awards Breakfast at the Hyatt Regency Chicago July 14.
Despite the early hour, attendees were greeted by a star-studded array of inspiring thank-you speechs from the winners of the 2008 awards—illustrator winner Floyd Cooper (The Blacker the Berry, HarperCollins) and author and illustrator honor winner Kadir Nelson (We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, Disney Book Group), as well as illustrator honor winners Jerry Pinkney (The Moon Over Star, Penguin) and Sean Qualls (Before John Was a Jazz Giant, Macmillan) and author honor recipients Hope Anita Smith (Keeping the Night Watch, Macmillan), Joyce Carol Thomas (The Blacker the Berry, HarperCollins), and Carole Boston Weatherford (Becoming Billie Holiday, Boyds Mills Press). Also honored was Shadra Strickland, the John Steptoe Award for New Talent winner for Bird (Lee and Low Books).
Andrea Davis Pinkney, chair of the King Awards Public Awareness Campaign, provided a tribute in honor of the anniversary, and Arnold Adoff read “of course,” a poem he wrote in special honor of the 40th year of the King Awards (see above).
The breakfast concluded with a salute to Satia Orange, director of ALA’s Office for Literacy and Outreach Services and staff liaison to ALA’s Ethnic and Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT), who is retiring next month.
The King Awards are sponsored by the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Committee and EMIERT. Visit the Coretta Scott King Book Awards website for more information.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 12:28 pm by George Eberhart
Jill Bolte Taylor
Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor captivated the audience Monday as she described the massive, debilitating stroke she suffered in 1996 at age 37 and her “journey into and back out of the silent abyss of the wounded brain.” On the morning it happened, she “could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body.” She looked at her arm and realized that she could not “define the boundaries of my body. I couldn’t tell where I began or ended, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.”
Two and a half weeks after her stroke, surgeons removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on her brain. Although she lost her ability to communicate with words, her eyesight and hearing became more acute. She experienced things only in the present moment with no linearity, having to lift up her feet, for example, one at a time because there seemed to be connection between the two. But after eight years of intensive therapy, she was able to recover her faculties. “I now feel peaceful,” she concluded, “because I have lost 37 years of emotional baggage.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:46 am by George Eberhart
Bookmobiles were again on view Sunday, parked outside McCormick Place, at ALA’s third annual Parade of Bookmobiles event. Visitors could examine both the exteriors and interiors of vehicles from the Warren-Newport Public Library in Gurnee, Illinois; Kenosha (Wis.) Public Library; Aurora (Ill.) Public Library; Fossil Ridge Public Library District in Braidwood, Illinois; Fountaindale (Ill.) Public Library; Cook Memorial Public Library in Libertyville, Illinois; Skokie (Ill.) Public Library; Arlington Heights (Ill.) Memorial Library; and Homer Township (Ill.) Public Library.
The award-winning new Warren-Newport Public Library bookmobile
The brand-new Warren-Newport bookmobile received a LLAMA Best of Show Award for its wrap design, created by WNPL Senior Graphic Artist Mary Hasting in consultation with Head of Outreach Services Carol Brandon.
The former Warren-Newport Public Library bookmobile
The old WNPL bookmobile was acquired by author and musician Tom Corwin, who plans to give the mobile library a workout in 2010, driving it in a “Behind the Wheel of the Bookmobile” tour with his journalist friend Peter Laufer along the Lincoln Highway (U.S. 30) through small towns with an impressive number of famous authors taking their turns at the wheel.
“We will start the tour in the spring in San Francisco and take it to New York,” Corwin said. “Along the way we will be collecting interviews with library users and talking to authors about how books and bookmobiles have changed their lives.”
Author Tom Corwin (right)
The highlights of the journey will be distributed in an online literacy outreach campaign and will culminate in a documentary film and possibly a book.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 10:59 am by George Eberhart
James Cuno
Do antiquities still belong in museums located far in time and space from the makers of the artifacts they house? Or do they belong to the government that happens to be in control of the land where the culture once flourished? At the ALCTS President’s Program on Monday, James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, made a strong case for the argument that “we all own antiquity,” and that museums and libraries exist to “keep the past in the public domain for the sake of those who succeed us.”
Referring to the debate over the ownership of the Elgin Marbles — classical Greek sculptures and other artifacts that were acquired by Lord Elgin for the British Museum in the first decade of the 19th century and which Greece would like to have returned — Cuno pointed out that those antiquities have been housed in London longer than there has been a Greek state. (Elgin acquired the antiquities legally from the Ottoman Empire.) In addition, displaying Athenian art from the 5th century B.C. in a wider context where it can be compared to other cultures of the time — the Roman Republic, the Persian Empire, the Han and Mayan cultures — is at least as beneficial as limiting its exhibition to the locale where it originated.
“Many of the great 20th-century collections of antiquities, such as those at Chicago’s Oriental Institute or the University of Pennsylvania,” Cuno said, “were acquired under the system known as partage, which is French for distribution or sharing. Local governments negotiated with foreign excavators to bring their expertise to the region, in partnership with local specialists and scientific societies.” The first choice of anything excavated went to the locals, while the rest could go to the excavating nations for study. “This had the benefit of building both local museums and ancient collections in foreign institutions,” Cuno explained. “Housing artifacts in different countries has multiple benefits: It protects them from any disasters that might occur in one locale, and it encourages others in many countries to become curious about the world and its diverse cultures. If it was a good idea then and people benefit from it now, then it’s a good idea now.”
One audience member asked Cuno how the British might feel if some other country took Stonehenge away from England, but Cuno answered by saying he questioned the value of privileging one viewing context over another. “We know a lot about things that are no longer in their original locations,” he concluded.
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