Project READY: Re-imagining equity and access for diverse youth.

To, Nhi.

 

Project READY. (n.d.). Project READY:  Reimagining equity and access for diverse 

youth. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

https://ready.web.unc.edu/about-us/ 

 

Summary: Project READY, which stands for Reimagining Equity and Access for Diverse Youth, 

is a free online professional development curriculum with the aims of promoting racial 

equity in libraries and educational settings. Developed by a group of educators and library

staff from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Project READY offers modules

on understanding racism, building cultural competence, and transforming library services, 

programming, and practices to support diverse youth. 

 

Evaluation: This project is a valuable resource for librarians as this could provide useful

information regarding topics of racial equity that may be lacking in their understanding. 

Provided that this is a free course, I believe Project READY should be an option that all 

libraries can look to add into their training or professional development for their staff 

members. The curriculum is comprehensive, leaving anyone who is able to complete the 

course fully to have a wealth of knowledge afterwards. I found this source to be incredible

cool as it is free and it is also online. Accessibility was definitely a consideration when 

creating this toolkit.

Cases Associated with Book Bans

 White, Sabrina

SW

Spilka, J. (2022). 377 Book Challenges Tracked by ALA in 2019--and the Problem Is Growing:        Book Banning and Its Adverse Effects on Students. Knowledge Quest, 50(5), 30-.

 

Summary: Spilka (2022) suggests that book banning not only misrepresents student voices, but some parents as well.  Furthermore, it points to several student victory cases who have prevailed against bans or censorship.  The article concludes with the “adverse effects of book bans” and then future Florida legislation. 

 

Evaluation: The structure and diction were at an appropriate level for stressed students who have previously read eight plus articles prior to and useful.  Its value came from the citing of several recent cases where students have fought back.  However, the adverse effects were subpar.  It did not contribute to previously known reasons.

 

Tags: Advocates, access, voice or representation

 

Interesting Line: “…banning a book is like banning an opportunity.” 

On Children's Media Literacy

 Watkins, Rachel

Buckingham, D., Banaji, S., Burn, A., Carr, D., Cranmer, S., & Willett, R. (2004). The media literacy of children and young people: A review of the research literature on behalf of Ofcom. Office of Communications. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10000145/1/Buckinghammedialiteracy.pdf

 

This is a review of the literature about media literacy of children. It discusses the aspect of media literacy: access, understand, and create. It also discusses barriers to children learning media literacy as well as things that enable them to learn media literacy.

 

 I thought this article was very intriguing. I think the subject matter is important and I feel like the authors did a good job evaluating the literature and presenting information in a format that made sense.

Enabling Inquiry Learning in Fixed-Schedule Libraries: An Evidence-Based Approach

Enabling Inquiry Learning in Fixed-Schedule Libraries: An Evidence-Based Approach

Stubeck, Carole J. Knowledge Quest; Chicago Vol. 43, Iss 3, (Jan/Feb 2015): 28-34

Summary: Libraries often adhere to a fixed schedule for class lessons and classroom room teachers are provided prep time or grade level professional learning community time. This supports the learner in a minor way and often supports for instructional development is missing.  Working with fixed schedules limits time for an important teacher to teacher collaboration and slashes the time needed to build inquiry-based studies. As a result, it creates challenges for the teacher librarian. The author addresses one middle school librarian’s efforts to create collaboration and collaborative lessons while on a fixed schedule. Some solutions are offered. She creates a strong argument that small measures should be taken to ensure learner-driven project learning in our school libraries.

Evaluation: The fixed schedule model, where students are cycled through the library or tech area without a core teacher, often creates low expectations. Often open library hours are limited, and there are strict procedures based on class management concerns. The alternative, flex time, as we like to say, benefits the community as a whole and is more reflective of what libraries aim to do, provide access. With time to co-teach units and direct research, the school will develop fluid use of a librarian's skills and all will benefit. To reach this goal the teachers need to be part of the selection process during the school year. The our collection development will support core curriculum.

Transforming as a School Librarian and the Power of Weeding

Morgester, A.  (2018). Transforming my perspective. Knowledge Quest, 47, 2, 22-27.

Summary

Anne Morgester, a highly experienced, involved, and reflective school library leader,

shares the most simple message for those of us new to the school library:  we must

continually transform. Five pivotal career milestones allowed her to clarify her
purpose and vision. She insists that school librarians must always examine
perspectives and, if necessary, rethink practices with the guidance of one’s purpose
and vision.

Evaluation

From the start, I could relate to Morgester and felt encouraged.  She began as a

secondary English Language Arts classroom teacher and, like me, decided to
pursue a school library endorsement.  I could not, however, imagine myself being
able to gather five such impactful experiences with a young family, fettered by
familial responsibilities prioritized over a new career.  Though feeling slightly less
inspired as I read on, I realized that I could make an effort to experience any one of
the transformative opportunities detailed. Morgester explicates each of the following
experiences and argues its transformative impact:  

1.  Seek out professional leadership at the state level;

2.  Participate in rich, engaging professional development;

3.  Get involved and lead within the AASL professional organization;

4.  Invest in a collaborative district-wide effort to revise the school library job
description and train library staff to meet new expectations.

5.  Volunteer to weed a school library collection.

The last transformative experience on this list actually reignited some inspiration as
it seems to be the easiest endeavor. I could, realistically, invest a couple hours each
week weeding at a local school library.  I believe this experience will educate me in
ways that I can’t beginto understand. But, more importantly, I acknowledge a hint
of social justice in the activity of weeding. Morgester’s belief about weeding must be quoted in its entirety:

"I now believe that failure to effectively weed our collections is nothing less than a form 

of censorship.  If we don't weed effectively, either our students need a machete to bushwhack

their way to the engaging, relevant, and accurate materials we have or they simply don't

attempt to explore the shelves because what they want is buried in the mass of weeds" (27).

As a teacher of literacy, I recognize the wisdom in her stated belief.  My non-readers
do not make the first effort to experience a book because they admit being overwhelmed
with all the choices in the library.  By weeding the collection, a library can expose the
better holdings. I also suggest that the school librarian work closely with any teacher
who has a free-choice reading program.  Like several teachers at my site, we chose to
focus on a topic or genre (or combination of like-genres) each month. The librarian and
clerk then curate a couple of bookshelves for which students can more easily browse.  
In my mind, this practice is like plucking the flowers from the vast meadow so that
students may enjoy.

In the end, I appreciated Morgester’s editorial because the clear takeaway is that
school librarians must seek out opportunities to transform and we are never complete
static works.

Friends for School Library Improvement

Poser-Brown, Lora

Kaun, T. (2014). Friends of the Oakland Public School Libraries: Building bridges to the local community. CSLA Journal, 38(1), 20-23.

Reflection: Reading about the Oakland, CA, public schools and their diminishing library existence engaged my mind. The district has formed a strong partnership with vested community members, who in turn formed a new Friends of School Libraries group. The article details how the district and Friends have invested in community relationships and bettering their school libraries, some of which have now been completely overhauled. The article contains great step-by-step information on the process of reviving a dying sector of the district’s budget: the school libraries.

“I want to provide patrons with good information”

Patrons often come to the library with specific problems at hand. One of these being health questions. As a result, librarians face the dilemma of wanting to supply good and factual information without overstepping their bounds. Librarians are not medical professionals and cannot dispense medical advice. Furthermore, what is the librarian to do when the patron seeks medical information that isn’t scientifically vetted?

The main issue is, that if the patron is coming to the public library for medical advice, that these patrons often have a lack of knowledge that they’re seeking to fulfill and cannot fully articulate the questions that they have. In these cases, physical resources are better because the patrons in question were not tech savvy or did not have access to technology. Researchers found that additional training for the librarians was always beneficial. Furthermore, for librarians that come across this issue often, it is wise to create partnerships with medical libraries that may have additional resources and staff that can answer more questions for the patron.

Rubenstein, E.L. (2018). “I want to provide patrons with good information”: Public library staff as health information facilitators. Library Quarterly, 88(2), 125-141. Doi:10.1086/696579

Collection directions: Some reflections on the future of library collections and collecting.

Summary:  Written for academic and research libraries, this article delves into changing access patterns.  The authors note how access and collections are being “decoupled” away from purchasing and local storage and towards a more general facilitated access.   They say that this trend “moves the library towards a set of services around creation, curation, and consumption of resources that are less anchored in a locally managed collection, and more driven by engagement with research and learning behaviors.” (p. 10)    The authors go on to say that “The network [presumably the World Wide Web or the internet, and not a university LAN] is reconfiguring how libraries organize their systems and collections, and how faculty and students organize their research and learning workflows.” (p. 13)   They have included a wonderful collections grid (see above) (p. 16): 

 Evaluation:  This article was well-written and au courant.   As we move away from localized, standalone storage in any arena, shared access and collaboration becomes more natural and expected.  Demand-driven licensing models and “rightscaling” investments in print appear to be the future.

Dempsey, L., Malpas, C., & Lavoie, B. (2014, July). Collection directions: Some reflections on the future of library collections and collecting. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 14(3), 1-42. doi:10.1353/pla.2014.0013

Jhana Morlan
INFO 266 / Spring 2016

Collections Redux: The Public Library as a Place of Community Borrowing

Poster: Curtin, Shane

Söderholm, J. j., & Nolin, J. j. (2015). Collections Redux: The Public Library as a Place of Community Borrowing. Library Quarterly, 85(3), 244-260.

Summary:

This article discuss the social history of libraries, from the castellated hideouts of Enlightenment academics to the front lines of social reform movements, to the post-Ford commercial world and the digital age. IT analysis how the idea of a self regulating information sphere (aka the internet) and capitalist ideas regarding unfair competition have led to the downscaling of library services as a whole. There are numerous interesting ideas here- like the idea of the anti-collection (the things the library “has” even though they aren’t actually part of its collection, and place oriented research (the library as a social space). It discusses how much of current library talk seems to demote the physical collection and play up digital, but questions wether this idea is genuine, or merely a strategy to be perceived as cutting edge. They advocate a more tempered approach to development, with emphasis on both print and digital resources. They define a library as “ place built around a collection and a collection built around a place”, and their conclusion, though not explicit, seems to be that libraries need to make collection development decisions re: print versus digital based on local patron needs, not according to the philosophical ideals held by those in change of collection development.
I found this quote particularly poignant:
“For more than a century the public library has engaged in developing its (supposed) field of expertise, from a literacy of literature aimed at supporting social welfare through knowledge, as ultimately embodied in books, to a literacy of information aimed at supporting equitable access, not clearly embodied in anything. “

Analysis:

I appreciate this article for not being the cookie cutter “Rah Rah Digital collections” fare.

The notion of digital collections as the end all and be all of libraries really grinds my gears. First of all, digital is only eh way of the future because people insist upon it. Consumers insist upon it because hey are easily suggestible, because they like toys, and because pundits tell them it’s progress. Markets insist upon it because it is profitable. While it has many advantages, it has no supremacy of form to hard copy. Digital life comes with its own sets of problems, like file decay (any preservationist will tell you that digital materials are not invulnerable or immortal)sever failure, hackers (a growing epidemic), and screens that disrupt our brain waves (to name a few).  We are working on solutions to these issues, reverting the old way might be much less trouble.  But it seems that print versus digital has become like Democrats versus Republicans; it is perceived as a zero sum game where coexistence is deemed neither desirable nor possible.

Furthermore we are always talking about access- but equal access in a digital world requires the elimination of all economic disparity. A disenfranchised person with no computer experience is still probably best served by walking into the library and being handed a book on their subject of interest. Yet, librarians by-and-large seem to buy into the “tehno-hubris” that digital is always better. Perhaps they will be purchasing drones for their loved ones this Christmas…?

All this talk of the “digital divide” is rather insipid, because it does not merely seek to raise awareness of a disparity of access, but implies that there is something wrong with not being plugged in. The only reason it is becoming impossible to survive without being online is because people are arbitrarily choosing to convert to digital services that worked much better the way they were before… I recently tried to park in a lot that charged by the hour. It turned out there was no kiosk at which to pay. The only way to pay was to download an app and use a credit card over the phone. This is about 100 times less convenient that the standard procedure, but wait… It must be better, because it involves technology! False. It not only marginalizing everyone without a cell phone (and arbitrarily making a phone necessary in a situation when there was no logical reason one should need a cell phone) it also incapacitates people who lost their phones, who are out of batteries, or who don’t have the data to download yet another pointless app. How is this supposed to work in the long term? Will every parking lot have its own app? How convenient. What colossal morons orchestrate these things, I wonder? Or are these things just the by-products of a society caught up in a technophilic zeitgeist.

As librarians we should be embracing technology that actually improves access for patrons in need, but we should not abandon print material because most patrons, in my experience at least, still prefer it. There were some recent studies that found out people don’t read the majority of the ebooks they purchase, and another on how children still prefer physical books to screens. Who knows how it will all play out...

In abandoning out own loyalty to the classic image of the library, and in eshewing print materials for the exclusively digital, we betray a significant portion of our patrons, and betray ourselves, accelerating the demise of our own profession, and giving more credence to the arguments of those who say libraries are not necessary. The news media and the pundits tell us digital is what people want, but instead of listing to talking heads, why don’t we ask patrons? As the article points out, every community is different. Every person is different. The library should be accountable to its patrons, not to external notions of what a library should be- notions handed down from the media and would-be futurists gabbing into the blogosphere. The library should be what the patron’s want it to be. If it can adapt to their needs, it will always remain and prosper.  If, on the other hand, we become nothing more than a physical directory to digital resources, then we WILL be unnecessary. I’ve no wish to  fight progress, but let's be certain first that the conversion to an all- digital world is actually an improvement.

Use of Collection Development Policies in Electronic Resource Management

Pozzebon, S. (2012). Use of collection development policies in electronic resource management.

            Collection Building, 31(3), 108-114. doi: 10.1108/01604951211243506

Pozzebon provides an analysis of collection development policies in academic libraries. Many policies are not equipped to address e-resources. Many policies, surprisingly, only address specific portions of the collections held. The reason for the tendency to create incomplete collection development policy is to avoid constantly changing policies to accommodate changing content. The author suggests that policy should be made complete and updated as much as possible because of the changing content.

Collections for the Digital Age

Hoback, Nicole

Reference: Disher, W. (2014). Crash course in collection development. Santa Barbara, CA.: Libraries Unlimited.

Summary: 

In chapter 15, Collections for the Digital Age, Disher (2014) delivers a thoughtful argument as to why e-Services are on the rise. With technology improving and becoming more accessible this has many libraries questioning their collection and its future impact. Libraries are now not as eager to update their physical collection and pay more attention to their electronic collection. The advantages to collections online (i.e. eBooks) is the accessibility that patrons are able to utilize from any device that can access the internet. With eCollections on the rise libraries have a unique opportunity to reinvent themselves and the space that once housed large print collections. Unlike traditional collections, digital collections take away the headache for users, such as late fees and do not require the traditional processing times. Of course to any change there are downsides to consider, one being that patrons who do not have internet access at home will be unable to take advantage of these changes, the library must now rely on technology, which can pose issues from time to time. Despite these obstacles, libraries are still choosing to pursue an eCollection, others deciding to purchase both the online and physical copy, but this can be difficult when a library can only afford to purchase one, due to budget constraints. With the continued improvements to technology it will be important for libraries to keep up with technology to remain relevant to its patrons. 

Evaluation: 

Reading through Disher's thoughtful analysis of the development of eCollections, I felt that many important points were made. One being that libraries will have to step out of their comfort zone and provide more options other than a print collection. While he does make many important points of the importance of an eCollection he also mentions the downsides, which are important when considering the impact that this will have on the libraries identity as a whole. For those who live in rural areas an eCollection may not be as important as keeping the physical collection up-to-date, due to the lack or unreliability of internet access. With technology expansion and eCollections on the rise I feel that this is an important time for libraries and expanding their network of patrons.