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Championing Literacy Around the Globe: Highlights from the World Literacy Summit
No full textIn April, 2023, I attended the three-day World Literacy Summit at Oxford University in England. Sponsored by the World Literacy Foundation, the Summit brought together leaders from eighty-five countries representing over two-thirds of the world’s population, all with a single focus—advocating, championing, and educating on the vital importance of improving literacy levels across the globe.Presentations included topics of leadership in literacy, new technologies/innovation, literacy programs and goals, funding/sustainable development, girls’ literacy, First Nation/mother tongue literacy, learning disabilities, community-based interventions for literacy, early childhood/primary literacy, and more
The Pandemic and Preschoolers: COVID Kids and How Libraries Can Support Them
No full textLibrarians around the nation must learn how to address preschoolers in a post-pandemic world.In an article called “COVID Babies,” Adam Clark explores various ways that the pandemic has affected children’s development. Clark begins with a vignette about a two-year-old named Charlie who is in speech therapy to help him learn to speak more than one-word utterances. Nancy Polow, one of the speech pathologists interviewed in the article, notes, “I have never seen such an influx of infants and toddlers unable to communicate. We call these children COVID babies.”Shuffrey et al. studied two cohorts of babies born shortly after the pandemic began: those whose mothers had COVID-19 while pregnant and those whose mothers did not have COVID-19 while pregnant. Compared to an older cohort of children born before the pandemic, both pandemic-era cohorts showed significantly lower scores on gross motor, fine motor, and social skills than the pre-pandemic cohort. While exposure to the virus in utero does not seem to be implicated, the researchers speculated that the stress that pregnant mothers experienced during the first part of the pandemic might have contributed to some of the developmental lags they saw. They urge long-term monitoring of children born during the pandemic to better understand the impact of being gestated and born during this time period
New Sendak Book Set for 2024 Release
No full textAmong my many surprises and joys coming out of the ALA Annual Conference in June was my learning that a previously unpublished picture book by my idol/icon/favorite author Maurice Sendak is production stages. Ten Little Rabbits will be released by HarperCollins on February 6, 2024. Rights were acquired from the Maurice Sendak Foundation
Membership Committee: Member Profiles
No full textMindy Perry, District 65 Dawes Elementary LibrarianSusie Isaac, Teacher, Cherry Creek (CO) School DistrictKristy Kilfoyle, Canterbury School Director of Libraries, Fort Myers, F
Playing it Safe in the Classroom: How Avoiding Controversy Norms the White Conservative Experience
No full textControversial as it may be, I entered education through Teach for America (TFA), an organization that purports to place new teachers in regions that struggle with literacy, retention, and poverty. There are many very harsh and warranted criticisms of the program, particularly related to their perpetuation of a white-savior mentality and the appeal to ambitious graduates looking to boost their resumes with a bit of social justice work before moving on to prestigious careers in public policy, politics, and law. I begin here not because I want to shape perspectives on TFA, but to contextualize how TFA has shaped me and, more specifically, my approach to curricula. I applied to the program several years after leaving university, motivated both by my passion for education and by my desire to help dismantle systemic oppression in America. I wanted to work for and with students who were disenfranchised, silenced, and otherwise ignored, but let’s be clear: I did not want to save my students; I wanted to celebrate them
The Congressional Joint Committee on Printing: The Nation’s Guardian of Public Access to Government Publications and Information
No full textThe Congressional Joint Committee on Printing has been the Nation’s guardian of public access to government publications for over a hundred years. Depository libraries have a close relationship with the members of Congress in their own state because those members are the ones that designate them as depositories. JCP has taken many steps to improve services to libraries and the public, including hiring the first librarian with the charge of helping Congress improve information services for the public and the libraries that serve them
Book Review: Taxonomies: Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information
No full textThe importance of taxonomies has been visible in recent years, whether it is with organizations that oversee describing communities of people or how to sell on the importance of taxonomies to the stakeholders of a company. There have been conversations within the Library of Congress on whether to change the search terms defining marginalized groups; universities are dealing with similar issues when they are faced with students questioning why a book has been categorized or shelved in a certain way; and if someone is trying to start a business that involves helping people with their travel needs, they need to consider who their targeted audience is, what terms that audience would be using and tailor the business model to suit those needs for prime optimization. These are just some of the examples of how taxonomies can help organizations and it is important to be able to identify and show this potential to colleagues and stakeholders
Core Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians: Assessment of Community Use and Recommendations for the Future of the Document
No full textThe Association for Library Collections Technical Services (ALCTS) Board of Directors approved the Core Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians, hereafter referred to as the “Core Competencies,” in January 2017. The Core Competencies lists the skills required of professionals performing cataloging and metadata work in libraries of all types. In the six years since the document’s release, the cataloging and metadata community has adopted new cataloging standards, experimented with new tools, and engaged in conversations and reparative efforts around inclusive metadata. In this paper, we, the authors of the Core Competencies, report the results of our survey research that assessed the current use of the document within the cataloging and metadata community and solicited comments on ways in which the document might be revised. We conclude with recommendations for immediate changes to the document, and for its future use and maintenance
Editorial: Open to Opportunity
No full textIf you’re reading this, then you’re doing so without hitting a paywall or login prompt, which is truly exciting for us, as we can now officially declare Library Resources Technical Services (LRTS) to be open access (OA). While every issue of LRTS can be classified as “long in the making,” this issue is particularly so. The pathway to open has been a long one and has involved a good deal of hard work behind the scenes at ALA/Core, with much of that work ongoing. The decision to make LRTS open pre-dates our tenure as editors and much of the efforts of the past year have been in planning for the sustainability of an OA model. Along the way we’ve encountered a lot of the nuts and bolts of OA, including platform considerations, marketing and outreach, budgeting, and fundraising. Oh, and on top of all that, we have a journal to edit! While the work has been interesting and gratifying, we are also happy to focus on our primary editorial duties knowing that the excellent leadership at ALA/Core is supporting the ongoing efforts to keep LRTS open
Glowing Reviews: Blacklight Bash a Raving Success
No full textCue the lights and music! As much as my co-workers joked that I was planning a rave, I was over-the-top excited to plan a Blacklight Bash for tweens at my library last summer. And while it wasn’t as crazy as a rave, attendees were raving about how much fun they had!Pre-pandemic, I visited a local museum that hosted a blacklight exhibit, which was truly immersive and mesmerizing—the posters, the artwork, the lighting, the science all combined into a sensory smorgasbord. If I thought it was cool, I knew tweens would too.I had also read an article years ago about a blacklight party a librarian in Illinois had created for teens, so I used some of her tips as I planned my event