Critics of the report, such as Jeri Hurd, a high school library media specialist at the Western Academy of Beijing, and Buffy Hamilton, a learning strategist at the Cleveland Public Library, say that the sample is skewed toward parents that are white, relatively young, and well-educated, and so do not represent the general population.
“I am interested in the literate practices of many families of diverse backgrounds, not just those who have the cultural/school capital,” Hamilton tweeted, taking the discussion to social media.

— Librarians Take Aim at Pew Study on Parents and Libraries | The Digital Shift

If you’re trying to raise a reader, you need your library. It’s too expensive and somewhat wasteful to buy the hundreds of books a young reader goes through in those first years of learning to read.

— Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading: Select quotes from parents and library staff (via pewinternet)

Children’s work has always been centered in transformative experiences. Children’s librarians not only influence children in their formative years, they open doors for curious minds. Our future depends upon the children’s room. Our power lies in creating learning spaces, influencing lives, and creating community. Our children are our gifts to the world, and the way we care for them says everything about our values as a culture.

You may not realize it, but you have the power to transform the lives of children, the library, and the community. You have the power to open doors, to nurture ideas and imagination. You have the power to change the shape of our world. You are the architects of dreams.

— Pam Sandlian Smith, “Architects of Dreams: Anythink’s Pam Sandlian Smith on the Power of Children’s Librarians” (via schoollibraryjournal)

chicagopubliclibrary:

“America’s school libraries are an inexhaustible fountain of knowledge. They provide today’s students with the skills they need to achieve great things in their lives. School librarians help children develop a love of reading and teach them to become critical thinkers. In other words, they are essential to building a child’s greatest asset—their mind.”—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Tumblarian list—help me update! →

thelifeguardlibrarian:

Librarians, students, library service lovers! Who am I missing? Who would like to be included or removed?

You heard the lady.

libraryadvocates:

The solution is in our school libraries.

thelifeguardlibrarian:

Retro Library

You know this owl is thinking “OR ELSE.”

Chancellor Kaya Henderson said: “We have invested in full-time librarians for the last three or four years and we haven’t seen the kind of payoff we’d like”While noting that she is not disparaging librarians she said “We have pulled away from programs where we haven’t received a return on our investment.” Apparently a payoff on investment would involve improved test scores.

— 

D.C. to cut 34 school librarians as they are a poor investment (via infoneer-pulse)

:(

Also from the Rumpus:

Inspired by last year’s video by Melissa Jackson, librarian at Ballou Senior High School in Washington DC, Guys Lit Wire held two book fairs that helped Ballou move from having a library with “less than one book for each of its 1,200 students at the beginning of 2011 to a ratio now of two books per student.”

Hoping to further decrease the school’s “literary deficit,” GLW is kicking off another book fair. Check out how to go about purchasing books off their wish list.

From the Digital Shift, Penguin’s Ebook Decision Has Chilling Effect on School Libraries:

Penguin Group’s temporary suspension of Kindle access to its titles for libraries last week reaffirmed Wendy Stephen’s decision to go the public domain route. The school librarian at Buckhorn High School in New Market, AL, had feared just this situation: spending money on devices and titles only to have the rights potentially taken away and her students left without books.

“It’s too complicated and too dicey, and that’s why I decided to go with things not under copyright because it’s a lot cleaner that way,” says Stephens, who offers ebooks to her students—but only those that are free.

Until now, I didn’t have an appropriately frightening subject, but now I do. No, it’s not the school librarian who allegedly took shushing to a whole new level by choking a student. That’s right, an elementary school library is getting rid of its Dewey Classification system.

Instead of replacing it with the LC system to prepare the little kiddies for college, they’ve replaced it with a bookstore organization model, to prepare the little kiddies to shop in bookstores that probably won’t exist anymore by the time they’re grown up.

It’s one thing when public libraries replace a precise classification scheme for a bookstore model, because public libraries are there to provide infotainment, not precise research collections. Besides, public libraries have long organized fiction and biographies into separate sections having nothing to do with Dewey. Public libraries are designed for the casual browser.

But school libraries? Aren’t these the libraries that are supposed to be preparing our children to do library research in high school and college? Information literacy and all that?

— LJ’s Annoyed Librarian shares a ghastly story for Halloween.