Kay's Place

When Kay Vandergrift launched one of the first sites for librarians, she never imagined it would become an overnight success

By Andrea Glick -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2004

Back in 1995, when the World Wide Web was young, Kay Vandergrift had an idea. Why not take all the materials she usually handed out to her library-school students and post them on the Web? In those days, only the information-science types in library school were using the Internet, but Vandergrift, a leading children's literature scholar, thought that she and other youth librarians should be using it, too. So she set about learning HTML coding and started sending her students online to get their "handouts." Every children's librarian knows the rest of the story: Vandergrift's Web pages (www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander) quickly became the place to go for information about children's and young adult literature—from scholarly texts to author fan sites to an exhaustive analysis of the tale of Snow White.

"She was pretty much a pioneer in seeing the value of the Web, in terms of both content and format, in teaching," says Mary K. Chelton, a library professor at Queens College, who met Vandergrift while working on a doctorate at the Rutgers University School of Information and Library Science.

Vandergrift, who turns 64 in September, is retiring this month from her post as a professor at Rutgers, New Jersey's state university, where she's taught since 1985. Speaking by phone from her home in Pennsylvania, Vandergrift says she's still amazed at how her little Internet experiment took off. Traffic stats of Rutgers's Web site recently revealed that her pages are the school's second most-popular online destination—after the university's home page. To Vandergrift, who's spent more than 40 years as an educator, the site just seemed like a natural thing to do: "I've always thought of teaching as giving things away and hoping that other people would modify and use and improve upon what you do," she explains.

Vandergrift speaks thoughtfully, in a soft, rather deep voice. She's a bit reserved, but every so often she makes a joke, punctuated by a hearty laugh that shows she doesn't take herself all that seriously. For instance, while describing her latest endeavor called Project ECLIPSE (a Web site devoted largely to the study of Mother Goose), she cheerfully admits that she can't remember what the acronym "ECLIPSE" stands for. "One of my information-science friends told me a good way to get grant money is to use an acronym," she says.

It's tough to pigeonhole Vandergrift. She's a professor of children's literature, an outspoken advocate for the rights of children and teens, a trailblazer in the use of technology in teaching, a feminist scholar, an expert on fairy tales, and a prolific author.

But more than anything, perhaps, Vandergrift is a teacher. She's won the Warren I. Susman Award, the highest honor at Rutgers for excellence in teaching. And she was granted the Teaching Excellence Award from the Association for Library and Information Science Education. Bonnie Kunzel, who studied under Vandergrift at Rutgers, says her courses were some of the hardest she ever took, but some of the best. Kunzel, a youth services consultant at the New Jersey State Library, remembers Vandergrift's young adult literature course as "infamous" for the list of 100 books students were asked to read beyond their regular coursework. Kunzel says it was then that she began her now regular habit of creating an index card with information on each book she's read. "I do booktalking all the time now all over New Jersey, and I'm able to do that because I started keeping those cards," she says.

Vandergrift's own grad-school education happened almost by accident. After earning a dual library-and-teaching degree, in 1962, from a small teacher's college in her native Pennsylvania, Vandergrift went to work as a junior high librarian. In the spring, she learned that her professors had secretly recommended her for a fellowship at Columbia's graduate library school. When she arrived at the school, its dean recommended she enroll at Columbia's Teachers College, since she'd already taken the equivalent of all her MLS courses. Vandergrift spent the next 23 years at Columbia, where she earned her master's and doctorate, and was a school librarian—and eventually the principal—at the university's lab school. She says the children's literature scholar Leland B. Jacobs, a Columbia professor at the time, had a huge influence on her career. "Until I took classes at Columbia, I didn't realize I really wanted to spend my life with children's books."

At Rutgers, Vandergrift found a way to marry that love of children's books to the then-new technology of the Internet. Besides developing her Web pages, she became a pioneer in distance education. A few years ago, for instance, Vandergrift developed a distance-education class on picture-book art and surprised even herself by how well it worked. Advanced technology, she says, allowed her to post numerous images online so that her students could study them intimately, any time, any place. She also taught a course called "The Voice of the Author," in which students had online chats with the likes of Philip Pullman, Julius Lester, and Jane Kurtz for a week at a time. Vandergrift ultimately headed the communication school's distance-education program and directed the undergraduate program in information technology. But none of this means she's a techie. At heart, says Vandergrift, she's still a "book person"—just one who gives little credence to the idea that kids are, by definition, rotting their brains by sitting in front of computers.

And then there's Project ECLIPSE (which, by the way, stands for Exemplary Children's Literature Interface Project for Scholarly Education), another vehicle that Vandergrift created to unite good old-fashioned scholarship with newfangled technology. The site (eclipse.rutgers.edu), which debuts this summer, explores the history of Mother Goose rhymes. (Vandergrift calls it her Internet "swan song.") Also, thanks to the collection at Rutgers's Zimmerli Art Museum, the project chronicles the evolution of Petra Mathers's Kisses from Rosa (Knopf, 1995), a picture book that took its witty creator 10 long years to complete.

It may come as a relief to Vandergrift's devotees that she has promised to continue work on her site for a few more years. But eventually, she hopes someone else will take over, both because she has a lot of interesting retirement plans and because, she says, as times change, new scholars need to step forward to improve on what's already been done.

Vandergrift says she's leaving the children's library profession "with concern," what with budget cuts and school library positions being slashed and the problems filling academic jobs such as her own. (Rutgers has not yet found a permanent replacement for Vandergrift.) She'd like to see librarians become even more outspoken advocates for kids. "Maybe," she adds impishly, "my aspiration in retirement is to go back to the '60s and lead a new gray-haired movement for the children in this country."