AASL to Unveil New Library Guidelines
The guiding principles will help media specialists better meet the needs of their students
By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2007
Keep your eyes open for a new set of guidelines from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). More than 40 media specialists, district coordinators, and university professors gathered in Chicago for a three-day Vision Summit in early December to examine the past, present, and future of the profession.
“We asked each state and state affiliate to send us their most visionary person, the person who could see beyond the day-to-day work and examine the school library media program of the future,” says Julie Walker, AASL’s executive director.
Some of the most important themes explored were that librarians would continue to operate in an environment that calls for more accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act, and that distance learning and homeschooling would further alter the way we look at traditional K–12 schools, Walker adds.
The guidelines “will be a picture of what a school library media program should look like” so that librarians are better equipped to meet the needs of their students, Walker says. They are not to be confused with the new learning standards that an AASL task force is currently drafting. The standards, explains Walker, will focus on “what a student has to know and be able to do, and what a library media program has to look like for the student to achieve that.” The two documents will complement each other.
One Vision Summit attendee, Diane Beaman, president of the New Hampshire Educational Media Association, says, “As I look back on the summit, I think that there was some real value to the process.” However, she left the gathering with the “realization that we have high expectations over a wide scope of responsibilities for ourselves, but we need to find support outside of our own profession—within other educational organizations.”
A guidelines task force should begin work during the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting in Seattle this month, says Walker.
