Table Of ContentChildren &
Libraries
getting
it
right
Virginia A. Walter
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
Chicago 2001
While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information appearing in this
book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or reliability
of the information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person
for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in this publication.
Cover and text design: Dianne M. Rooney
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walter, Virginia A.
Children and libraries : getting it right / Virginia A. Walter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8389-0795-4
1. Children’s libraries—United States. 2. Young adults’ libraries—United States.
3. Public libraries—United States. 4. Children’s librarians—United States. 5. Young
adult services librarians—United States. I. Title.
Z718.2.U6 W35 2000
027.62'5—dc21 00-057600
Copyright © 2001 by the American Library Association. All rights reserved except those
which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976.
Printed in the United States of America.
05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction v
1 Where We Came From: The Tradition of Public
Library Service to Children 1
2 Where We Are Today: Contemporary Public
Library Service to Children 17
3 Warning Signs 38
4 The Changing Lives of Children 48
5 Emerging Trends in Library Services to Children 78
6 Future Libraries and Future Kids:
Some Alternative Visions 91
7 Getting It Right 107
Afterword: Five Laws of Children’s Librarianship 123
Appendix
Competencies for Librarians Serving
Children in Public Libraries 125
References 131
Index 149
iii
Introduction
I SPENT THE LAST SIX MONTHS of the twentieth century
writing this book. It was an interesting time for someone to
be thinking about the fragile connections between children and libraries in
our country.
During the second week in August, a man who had been active in white
supremacist activities shot several children in a Jewish community center in
Los Angeles. He said he wanted to give America a wakeup call to kill Jews.
Earlier in the summer, a man drove his car into a southern California day care
center where his ex-girlfriend used to work, killing two children. And the
families in Littleton, Colorado, got ready for a new school year. The library at
the Columbine High School, where two teenagers had turned their guns on
their classmates the previous spring, was hidden from view by a new wall of
blue lockers.
The House of Representatives attached a rider to a juvenile justice bill
that would require that libraries receiving the special e-rate for telecommuni-
cations purposes use filtering software.
In conferences and on electronic discussion lists, librarians debated about
the reported inaccuracies of a historical novel about a girl in an Indian board-
ing school and the ethics of buying the British edition of the popular Harry
Potter books in order to put them into the hands of their rabid young
American fans before the American edition was published.
Young children were obsessed with Pokemon, playing the Nintendo
games and collecting and trading the cards that featured the cute little
Japanese cartoon “pocket monsters.”
On Thanksgiving Day, a six-year-old boy named Elian Gonzalez was
plucked from the ocean sixty miles off of Florida. His mother had embarked
from Cuba with a small group of refugees in a rickety boat that tore apart in
the rough seas. Only Elian and one other woman survived. The best interests
of this little boy would become submerged in a battle between the estranged
v
vi | Introduction
Cuban and American sides of his family as he was held up as a symbol of
resistance for political activists in both Cuba and the United States.
The Kansas Board of Education voted to discourage the teaching of evolu-
tion in the state’s classrooms and eliminated the Big Bang from the science cur-
riculum altogether, on the grounds that these two phenomena are only theories.
Closer to home, my grandchildren continued on their separate paths
toward literacy. Eight-year-old Vivian was racing through the Harry Potter
books along with most of the rest of the kids in this country who read for
pleasure. Four-year-old Nadia had learned to “read” David Shannon’s “No,
David!” (1998) after dozens of repeated readings by her mother, her father,
her sister, her grandmother, and anybody else she could cajole. Baby Natasha
started her subscription to Baby Bugand showed a marked preference for the
picture of the butterfly in Tana Hoban’s Black on White (1993).
As I sit at my computer at home, I can see photos of those three much-
loved little girls, the treasures of my heart, as well as a picture I cut from a
Smithsonianmagazine that shows two itinerant musicians, a father and son,
sitting by a country road in India, dressed in radiant shades of orange and
gold. They are both beaming with pleasure as the man teaches the small boy
how to play the beautiful stringed instrument that will be his one day. I keep
this picture to remind me of the pleasure of intergenerational connections and
to remind me of my responsibility to all children, not just those I know and
love. Suzanne Morse (1998), the executive director of the Pew Partnership for
Civic Change, tells about a greeting used by Masai warriors in Africa: “How
are the children?” The traditional response is, “All the children are well.”
My first and strongest motivation in writing this book is my conviction
that all the children are not well. I am heartsick at the violence that pervades
this country and the terrible harm it is doing to all our children. I am angry
that children go homeless and hungry and without adequate medical care in
the richest country in the world. I worry about the children who are growing
up without basic literacy skills and those who are growing up without expo-
sure to books and ideas that will nourish them and give them dreams. I worry
about the children who spend too many hours in front of computer and tele-
vision screens, and I worry about the children who never have the chance to
use a computer at all.
I am convinced that as a nation we are failing our children. I would save
them all if I could. I would fix the broken schools and families, the juvenile
justice system, and the health care system. I would create communities where
Introduction | vii
children were cherished for who they are and what they contribute to the
world now, not just for the money they spend, the votes they can generate,
or the adults they will someday be.
For now, I am engaged in a more modest mission, but an important one.
I want to fix our libraries. They are not all hopelessly broken. Many of them
are glorious kid spaces where children are respected and nurtured. But the
needs are so great, and our potential is so strong. We can do it better. We can
get it right in every community, for every child.
This is not a how-to-do-it book. It is more of a how-to-think-about-it
book. I was influenced initially by Walt Crawford and Michael Gorman’s
Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness, and Reality (1995). As Crawford and
Gorman reflected on possible future scenarios, they found it helpful to look
back to the historical foundations of the library as an institution and librarian-
ship as a profession. One product of their reconsideration of libraries’ traditions
was the formulation of a new set of laws of library science, based on the clas-
sic laws set forth by Ranganathan in 1931. Here is the new formulation:
Libraries serve humanity.
Respect all forms by which knowledge is communicated.
Use technology intelligently to enhance service.
Protect free access to knowledge.
Honor the past and create the future (Crawford and Gorman 1995, 8).
Like Crawford and Gorman, I have found it useful to look at the past in
order to speculate about the future. In the early days of the American Library
Association, the conference proceedings were published nearly verbatim. I
could almost hear the voices of the women who spoke with such eloquence
about tenement children whose squalid lives would be enriched through read-
ing, about the rural children who needed better access to books, and about
the new specialists in children’s library services who were working to meet
those needs.
In this book, I have tried to honor that past while I think about creating
the future. Chapter 1 is a descriptive and evaluative look at the history of
library services to children in the United States. Chapter 2 assesses the cur-
rent status of children’s library services. Chapter 3 looks at some warning
signs and trouble spots in contemporary library service to children. Chapter 4
examines the ways in which children’s lives are changing, creating new
viii | Introduction
opportunities and challenges for the librarians who serve them. Chapter 5
looks at emerging trends in library services that indicate positive responses to
changes in children’s lives. Chapter 6 presents three alternative visions for
library services for children in the twenty-first century. These visions are
based on three different conceptualizations of the child of the future: the child
as reader, the child of the Information Age, and the child in the community.
Librarians will need to think carefully about whether these images of the child
are mutually exclusive or whether they can coexist. They will need to design
services that meet the needs and circumstances of the children who live in
the here and now of the twenty-first century. Chapter 7 offers ten steps for
achieving effective library services for future kids, strategies and visions that
will help us to get it right. The afterword outlines five laws of children’s librar-
ianship to guide us through the next century.
CHAPTER Where We Came From
11
The Tradition of Public Library
Service to Children
WHEN PHILANTHROPISTS AND CIVIC LEADERSestablished
the first public libraries in the United States in the early
1800s, their intentions were to provide good reading to adults who were not
wealthy enough to purchase their own books and to help assimilate immi-
grants from Europe into American society. With very few exceptions, these
early libraries were not open to children.
The Beginnings
In 1876, the U.S. Bureau of Education commissioned a study of the “history,
condition, and management” of public libraries. In his chapter on public
libraries and the young, William I. Fletcher argued forcibly that libraries
should change their policies that limited access to children. He based his argu-
ment on the need to develop good reading habits and refined reading early in
life. He wrote: “If there is any truth in the idea that the public library is not
merely a storehouse for the supply of the wants of the reading public, but also
and especially an educational institution which shall create wants where they
do not exist, then the library ought to bring its influence to bear on the young
as early as possible” (p. 414). He warned that if librarians do not reach chil-
dren while they are young, they will develop a taste for light reading—dime
novels and cheap stories. Libraries, he insisted, should provide children with
good books that are “instructive and stimulating to the better nature”
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