The Natural

E-Mail This Link

Enter recipient's e-mail:

Close

Email

Print |

Reprint/License |

Subscription |

RSS |

Share

By Kate McClelland -- School Library Journal, 08/01/2005

Caroline Ward's energetic enthusiasm for books and children is contagious. In 36 years of library service to children, no librarian, student, or child who has heard her tell a story, give a booktalk, lead a discussion group, or teach a children's literature class is likely to have forgotten the experience.

While Ward is cheerfully offhand about her accomplishments, it is the solid substance and determination behind her efforts that make her a perfect choice for this year's Grolier Foundation Award, honoring a librarian who has made "extraordinary contributions" to encouraging a love of reading and books in young people. The lifetime achievement award, which is sponsored by Grolier, an imprint of Scholastic Library Publishing, comes with a $1,000 prize.

Ward has worked in urban, suburban, and rural libraries–from the Philadelphia Free Library to the State Library of Vermont to New York State's Nassau County Library System to the Ferguson Library in Stamford, CT, where she is now coordinator of youth services. Over the years, she has been a member of and chaired many book award committees, including the panels of the Newbery Award, the Ezra Jack Keats New Author/Illustrator Award, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award. She has also served her profession nationally as president of the Association for Library Service for Children, from 1999 to 2000.

A magnetic speaker, Ward has spoken powerfully all over the world on the subject of children and books, most recently at the International Board on Books for Young People Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. Resolved to ensure the future of the Pura Belpre Award, which honors Latino writers and illustrators, she cochaired a task force, making a persuasive appeal that helped raise close to $70,000 to fully endow the award. Ward is a powerhouse with an infectious smile and the inclusive manner of a woman who has never met a stranger...perfect qualifications for a 21st-century children's librarian who has a passion for bringing children and books together...perfect, in fact, for the 2005 Grolier Award winner.

Were you a big reader as a girl?

I grew up in a small town in northwestern Michigan, and I was a voracious reader. I always had eight to 10 library books out at any one time. I read them simultaneously. I was such a fixture at our public library that they would give me jobs after school and on the weekend and in the summer. I was an early version of the teen volunteers that are so popular in libraries today.

How has that experience shaped your perspective on children and books?

After all these years, I still have an opportunity to purchase books every other week, with my staff, for the library, to do a lot of reading, to have the extraordinary privilege and pleasure of knowing so many colleagues in the publishing world and authors and illustrators. While children’s library services and materials have greatly changed and expanded since I became a librarian, still, at the heart of it all, is the book. I always tell my staff that we really are the experts, not just in the library, but in our communities. There’s really nobody else, no other professional, that knows quite as much about children’s literature and can have the kind of influence that public libraries can.

As busy as you are, you always find time to review books. Why is that so important to you?

At my very first job at the Free Library in Philadelphia, every children’s librarian was required to review books. It was an important part of our professional development. I have continued to do it because I feel that you can have discussions with colleagues about book evaluation, but it really is very different when you sit down with a book and describe why it should be purchased—or why it shouldn’t. You have to bring to the table all of the selection criteria that you’ve learned and apply it. So I encourage my staff to review books for professional journals. I think it’s a terrific way of stretching your critical skills.

I also think it’s wonderful preparation for librarians who are interested in getting involved in national award committees. If you’re able to intelligently and succinctly analyze a book, it gives you a very good basis for doing the kind of work that’s done on award committees.

What was it like chairing the 1990 Newbery committee?

Every chair I’ve ever spoken to has said it really is one of the great thrills of anyone’s professional career, and I would agree. The book that won the Newbery Medal the year I was chair was Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. I’m particularly proud of that book. Every Newbery committee wants to make a good choice—you want the book to last.

I just did a book discussion last fall and had 20 kids come to hear me talk about Number the Stars. Every time I do a book discussion with it, something new comes up that I hadn’t thought of or we hadn’t discussed in prior years. It’s really a book that is read and loved and very much alive.

Over the years, you’ve had a knack for encouraging—and mentoring— promising young librarians. What qualities do you look for?

When I’m hiring people for my own staff, I look for people with creativity; I look for people with energy; and I also look for readers. I think this goes back to the whole theory that really the book is at the heart of what we do, and we are the community’s experts in the book.

When I worked [as a consultant] with other librarians, whenever I saw someone with that kind of special energy and enthusiasm, someone who was willing to go out beyond their local library and get involved in a bigger part of the world, I was always very anxious to help them out, take them along, introduce them, encourage them to review for School Library Journal, try to get them a scholarship to go to their first ALA conference. As a matter of fact, I’ve gotten many people to take advantage of the Penguin Putnam Scholarships that ALSC sponsors [which are given to librarians who have never attended ALA’s annual conference]. If I see that people have enthusiasm, energy, and interest, I’m always willing to give them a helping hand.

Many new librarians feel they hardly have time to run their own departments, much less become more active in the profession. What advice can you offer?

It’s a hard thing to answer. I think that a lot of it goes back to initiative and energy. I sometimes will say to people, “Look, you can’t do it all. While you’re raising a family, you might want to focus on one thing. Maybe you’ll try to do some book reviewing, since it’s not going to entail traveling. Or maybe you’ll go to an ALA conference every couple of years, so you can share what you’ve learned with other staff members.”

I think people should be doing a little something to get out, because you come back so much more enriched and energized and your knowledge base grows. Even though it can be a stretch—financially, as well as the time commitment—in the long run, it’s well worth it.

You never seem to get discouraged. Is there anything that makes you mad?

There are a few things that bother me. I suppose I don’t suffer fools gladly. I like things to be done right. I learned a lot from Vermont librarians, to make do with not a lot of money and not a lot of staffing. One of the other things that I have tried to do over the years, that’s been very helpful for me, is that I’ve always had a grant going. Either a grant that I’m working on or a grant idea that I have in my top drawer that’s going to become my next grant.

The Library Services and Construction Act, our federal grant program that’s administrated through state libraries, offers marvelous opportunities for applying for special grants. There are community foundations, local banks, and some states have state-funded grant programs for libraries. So there are lots of good opportunities for librarians to apply for grants. I think that is something that has allowed me, in environments where I have felt that I haven’t had a lot of money and resources, to take an idea and really develop it.

When a grant is funded, that forces you to do the program and keep track of it within a time frame, so that you can really see the impact. And since you’re also doing statistical analysis for the funders, you have a lot of very good information at the end of your grant year. We just got an LSTA No Child Left Out grant, which is a special needs grant. It has allowed us to do programming with lots of assistive technology, software, two specially designed computers, and a professional collection of pamphlet files—there’s an amazing myriad of parts to this grant. I’m already working on my next idea. It’s always good to have a grant in the back of your head.

What else gives you hope for our profession?

I feel so fortunate that I am in a job that I happen to love. I mean, what other job has this kind of outpouring of creativity in publishing? Every year—as Arnold Lobel, whom I love, once said—an embarrassment of riches descends upon us. So we’re constantly reading and getting excited about books. There’s also a lot of exciting things happening in other formats. Our library has just signed on with one of the audible e-book companies. So patrons will be able to download their audiobooks. There’s a whole new world that we’re able to provide to our patrons. The children we help are new every year—and the materials are new. How could you ever be bored in this profession?