News Wrap-Up '97; I Spy: Librarians in the Public Eye
RSSBy Renée Olson -- School Library Journal, 12/01/1997
In 1997, librarians either craved attention--or got it and wanted to get rid of it.
Look at me! Don't look at me! To me, those cries sum up the year in librarianship. Campaigns to capture the attention of library directors, principals, and others in charge around the country have, of late, been of epic proportions. But librarians this year also baked under the glare of public scrutiny.
It's satisfying to report that many attempts to attract attention to libraries have been successful. If you pled your case for a flexible schedule, more staff, or maybe a renovation project, and you got it, you know your message hit home. For example, see "Ask and You Shall Receive," p. 31.
But there were too many other times in this age of rampantly spreading attention-deficit disorder when, from my vantage point, getting attention seemed nearly impossible. You saw this in our news this year: the school districts that replaced librarians with assistants and the politicians who sought to cut public library funding to avoid raising taxes.
Ironically, 1997 was also the year we saw the public eyeballing librarians more closely and more frequently than in recent years. The culprit? The wars over whether to install Internet filters in libraries. Of course, some librarians relished the opportunity to espouse First Amendment principles for young people. But once the conflict hit the local press in burgs around the nation, librarians who believed in open Internet access risked being branded an online porn advocate. I invite you to see how that plays when you're in the produce aisle at the grocery store.
And speaking of attention, there's that big gift from Bill Gates. He certainly noticed libraries, but some are asking whether it's a good idea (see "Gates Opens Wallet," p. 32).
Despite the downsides, the attention that librarians and libraries got this year is a very, very good sign and one I hope continues next year. Because without the attentive ear of administrators, politicians, and parents, librarians who work with young people can call it a day.
| To Grow a Scholar |
| "I want to lead black people to the library. If you want to develop a young man into Tiger Woods, you take him to the golf course. If you want to make him a Michael Jordan, you take him to a basketball court. If you want to develop black Americans into intellectual giants, you take them to the library. There can only be so many Tiger Woodses and Michael Jordans. However, every black American can learn to read and can develop intellectually in a way that will help him or her no matter what he or she does." --Dr. James Meredith, fellow at the Leadership Institute, Washington, DC, Newsweek, October 6 |
The clash of readily available pornography on the Web and community concern over unfiltered Internet access for children created, hands down, the highest-profile library news story of the year.
If 1996 was the year that web use exploded in school and public libraries, 1997 was the year that the public caught wind of the pornographic and violent nature of some of its offerings. Librarians got a rude awakening when the resource that was to liberate them from limited print collections also brought them protracted headaches.
At Boston Public Library, which holds the dubious distinction of being one of the country's filtering pioneers, BPL President Bernard Margolis first decried Internet filters, but then installed Cyber Patrol on computers used by children. There's a name now for this approach--unfiltered access for adults and filtered access for young people: the Boston Solution.
| The Entrenched Internet |
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| In October, SLJ's biennial survey on school library spending and services showed that 62 percent of library media centers have access to the Internet, while nearly half--49 percent--have access to the Web. A full third of respondents saw extra funding to pay for Internet access. |
Right after the Supreme Court decision, ALA released its "Statement on Library Use of Filtering Software", alerting librarians to its stance on filters. The statement explains that libraries that use filters are blocking access to constitutionally protected speech. To assuage concerned parents, the association drew up a well-received handout listing kid-friendly sites. Not surprisingly, Karen Jo Gounaud was not assuaged. Gounaud, of Family Friendly Libraries, a Virginia-based group that advocates restricting youth access to sexually oriented materials, called ALA's solution "pure hypocrisy." Her take on the list? "A nutritious lemonade stand does not make up for a fenceless crater."
| Ask and You Shall Receive |
| A takeover by New York State of the Roosevelt Junior/Senior High School led to a library renaissance within its walls, thanks to Carol Kroll, Director of the Nassau County School Library System, and Library Media Specialist Barbara Hamill. To revive the Long Island facility, the district offered Kroll $17,000. But she turned it down and instead asked for $125,000--and got it. |
His change of heart came from hearing about the other librarian in this picture--Karen Schneider and her Internet Assessment Project--and looking at the project's findings. Schneider, a librarian at the Environmental Protection Agency in New York City, started the project when she got tired of hearing librarians discuss filters without understanding them. She's told SLJ that whether or not librarians use filters, they should know how they function. Otherwise, in her view, they are abdicating responsibility to an outside vendor.
| Subaru Gets It, Time Doesn't |
| Support for librarians popped up this year in an unusual place--Drive magazine, a promotional publication put out by Subaru. Yes, the car company. But Time magazine's October 27 report, "What Makes a Good School," failed to note the importance of librarians and libraries, despite being a more likely venue for the topic.
In Drive, oddly juxtaposed with an update on Subaru locks, is an article called The Internet: Is It Replacing the Library?". Readers learn that: Students need librarians and other educators to teach them the skills needed to locate and organize information in the face of a multitude of electronic sources. No matter how user-friendly interfaces and search engines appear, students must learn how to use them correctly and efficiently. They must understand how to define a research topic, how to conduct an effective search, and how to interpret and evaluate information resulting from that search. Once students attain these skills, the Internet can prove to be an excellent library resource. On the other hand, Time's treatment of libraries boiled down to a mention of a "mentally unstable teacher" who, after telling her principal that she feared that she might harm a child, was transferred to a school library "in order to reduce her contact with students." Enough said. |
- Gates Opens Wallet
Last December, SLJ predicted that we'd "watch Microsoft continue to cultivate a cozy relationship with librarians in the interest of marketing its products." And look what Bill did. He went and donated $400 million in funds to U.S. public libraries for technology and software through the new Gates Library Foundation. There's no doubt that libraries benefit from Gates opening his wallet, but Gates also wins big: he's secured for Microsoft a captive audience of people using computers for the first time. - Clinton Supports Education?
Secretary of Education Richard Riley told ALA Midwinter Meeting attendees in February that President Clinton had made education "his number one priority." Meanwhile, Clinton zeroed out the only federal funding available for school library materials. Congress put that money--$350 million--back in the FY98 budget. Another smile-producing event: funds for educational technology soared to $541 million. - Symons Beats Dowlin
Juneau (AK) High School Librarian Ann K. Symons neatly won ALA's 1998A±99 Presidency over former San Francisco Public Library Director Ken Dowlin. The vote was decisive: 8,925 votes for Symons and 3,197 for Dowlin. Still, the total represented only a fraction of ALA's some 58,000 members. - Libraries Trim Telecom Costs
While the process of approving federal telecommunications discounts for schools and libraries and then figuring out how to administer them consumed all of 1997, the wait may be worthwhile. K.G. Ouye, who heads the federal group that will review discount applications, is also City Librarian in San Mateo, CA. Back home, Ouye helped set up statewide discounts earlier this year. As a result, her library now saves $8,000 a year on telecom costs and her eight-library consortium saves approximately $1,000 a month. Federal telecom discounts are scheduled to go into effect January 1, 1998. - Library Power Funds Dry Up?
The Dewitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the sponsor of the National Library Power Program, announced this fall that it will investigate whether to continue its support for the program on a smaller scale, now that the decade-long program has wound down. But financial problems may thwart that. Reader's Digest stock prices took a dive this year, and while the Fund expects to maintain support for its charitable trusts at current levels through 1998, the more distant future is less clear, said Bruce Trachtenberg, a company spokesperson. Fifty percent of the Fund's assets come from Reader's Digest stock; the other half is invested in stocks and bonds. - It's the Babies, Stupid
A gift came to librarians this year who work with very young children--a renewal of interest in infant brain research. Of major significance to librarians is that some researchers, according to the April 17 New York Times, believe "the number of words an infant hears each day is the single most important predictor of later intelligence, school success, and social competence." Put that in your next grant application. - Adios to Aloha State Contract
Hawaii's outsourcing contract with book wholesaler Baker & Taylor died a very public death this summer when the state library system yanked the plug on the $11.2-million, five-year book selection, acquisitions, cataloging, and processing deal. In the end, both B&T and State Librarian Bart Kane, engineer of the outsourcing-to-save-cash plan, suffered: B&T's experimental venture into large-scale outsourcing went belly up and Hawaii's board of education put Kane on a short leash by renewing his contract on July 25 for just six months. - Baker and Taylor, Part II
In the same year that B&T took a beating in Hawaii, it also got served with a federal lawsuit charging that since 1979 it has overcharged libraries by as much as $100 million by playing with discounts based on types of binding. A U.S. District Court judge threw out the case in July due to vagueness in the charges, but the federal government refiled an amended suit in August. The Chicago Public Library has also filed a similar suit on its own.
Hear! Hear! for Advocacy
Last month, in an SLJ feature article called "The Invisible School Librarian," Gary N. Hartzell, a former high school principal, gently scolded library media specialists for spending too much time with other librarians, and not enough time with other educators. Would schmoozing with educators have helped in Philadelphia, a district profiled in SLJ's August issue as having a schizophrenic attitude toward its elementary school libraries? Perhaps.
| The Money Maze |
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| The prize for 1997's most unusual library fundraiser undeniably goes to the Cornfield of Dreams Maze in Caledonia, MI, outside of Grand Rapids. Volunteers, including a farmer, recruited through the local grain elevator, and a fire chief, planted a three-and-a-half acre field with sorghum in the shape of a 15th-century French maze. Once the crop reached its normal height of up to seven feet, the library charged adults $5 and children $3 for the opportunity to get lost in its two miles of trails. The maze netted $32,000 to go toward construction of a new 7,000-sq.-foot library. The idea came not from library staff, but from a local court reporter who got the idea after speaking with a bookstore clerk about mazes. |
What's also at play in Philadelphia, as in other cities and towns, is a troubling disconnect in the minds of administrators between library media specialists and electronic information. Sure, some library media specialists skirt online resources, but the majority embrace them, albeit with healthy skepticism.
Still, the fact that these impressions are without basis hardly negates their ability to do damage. If they're not ushered straight out of town, it will be the person with the word "technology" in his or her title who stays on the payroll, not the school librarian.What holds promise now is that Ken Haycock, President of the American Association of School Librarians, is using his office to kick off a five-year national AASL effort to promote the profession. What's not as promising is the likelihood of getting the education community's attention. With just 10 percent of the nation's school librarian population, AASL doesn't have a large crowd to help make a racket. Haycock told SLJ that a budget for the project, which starts next year, should be ready in January.
The Roll of the Dice
Where is the Internet going in 1998? That's not an easy question. For the sake of education, let's hope that librarians will spend more time next year focused on how to search and organize content on the Web and less on whether the content is likely to offend.
In the charmingly titled "Taking the 'Dick' Out of Moby Dick," an October Hotseat interview on HotWired , Karen Coyle, a librarian in the University of California system, succinctly explained why the state of information retrieval on the Web needs to improve.
| Reader's Advisor? |
| MIT Prof and Wired columnist Nicholas Negroponte predicts in his September column that traditional book publishers will slowly but surely disappear, as will bookstores. What society really needs instead, he asserts in his last paragraph, is "a new intermediary. One who--or that--tells you which books you are most likely to enjoy." The only reason he doesn't equate his "new intermediary" with a librarian--in person or online--must be because he only had seven sentences left. |
While Coyle works in a university setting, the need for good information retrieval for younger students is even more important because they are just learning how to do research. PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection, may help because it provides a way to embed cataloging information in a web page, but to date, it's better known due to speculation as to whether it should be used to embed rating labels.
Coyle also commented on an issue that deserves more attention--that is, if librarians want students to be able to research anything other than a current event on the Internet. "I find it so ironic that as we move into the information age we're starting to treat our information more and more shoddily in terms of how we take care of it," she said. "We aren't archiving; things disappear off the Internet never to come back again."
Still, the filter debate won't evaporate, in part because filters are a fantastic money-making proposition. For the retail market, Microsoft announced this fall that it would bundle Cyber Patrol with the newest version of its web browser, Internet Explorer. However, librarians who are eyeing Gates Library Foundation grants should not expect Cyber Patrol as part of the deal: the Foundation told SLJ that it does not plan to ship it to participating libraries.
RenAce Olson is SLJ's News and Features Editor.
