Julie Roach

Cambridge Public Library youth services manager (and Horn Book reviewer) Julie Roach will be discussing library services for preschool children at our Fostering Lifelong Learners event (free; you should come) at CPL on April 25th. I asked her to share some of her thoughts on serving this (very) particular audience. (I think her answer to question #5 is one of the wisest things I’ve heard.)

1. What’s the most important thing about library service to preschoolers that you DIDN’T learn in library school and wish you had?

In library school you learn the theory and philosophy behind library service to preschoolers, which is as it should be.  Children’s librarians need a solid background there before venturing out on their own.  But I’m not sure any academic setting could have prepared me for what an emotional roller coaster a typical work day would be.  Every day with preschoolers and their entourage rockets back and forth between hilarity and tragedy, discovery and near-disaster (or sometimes full-on disaster) and the situation gets more complex depending on how many other people are in the space and their range of ages and stages.  In the mornings, our children’s room often has more than 200 people in it.  The drama is both utterly addictive and completely exhausting.

2. If you were suddenly told you had to do a story time in FIVE MINUTES, what would be your go-to stories?

This actually happens to me quite regularly!  Our storytimes skew pretty young, so I gravitate toward funny stories with very simple plots or concepts that invite kids to participate. They tend to involve animals or vehicles that make a lot of noise.  I also want to make sure the parents and caregivers get to laugh—I want them to see how fun this all is so, hopefully, they’ll go home and keep reading aloud.  I love Jan Thomas’s books, Bark George by Jules Feiffer, Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow? by Susan Shea, The Bus for Us by Suzanne Bloom, Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard, Tiny Little Fly by Michael Rosen, A Perfect Square by Michael Hall, and Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s concept books.  And if the group is such that everyone can see a smaller book, I have fun using Olivier Dunrea’s gosling books.

3. What is the darndest thing a preschooler ever said to you?

This is one of the job’s best perks–a conversation with a preschooler can take you to a whole new dimension!  Although often they’re just saying out loud what everyone else is secretly thinking.  Once a very small but confident child approached the desk and dramatically looked around our rather large children’s room.  Then he looked right at me and demanded:  “Which one is the best book?”

4. If you could give publishers of preschool books one piece of advice what would it be?

Keep making those really great books, please!  The ones that make us laugh, the ones that make us think, the ones that make us gasp, the ones that make us a little scared, the ones that put us in charge.  We especially like them simple!

5. And if you could give parents of preschoolers one piece of advice, what would it be?

All of the books in the library are free to borrow and you get to return them later, so let your young child pick out a book too, on his own—even if his choice is impractical or too hard or too easy, even if you have a copy at home, even if it’s the unabridged edition of David Copperfield!  How empowering and special to get to choose your own book when you’re small.  How deflating to hear that your choice is not suitable for you.  Save some room in the library bag for the child to have a choice.

Join us on Thursday, April 25, 2013, for a big day focused on the littlest people.

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Had I just been an adult about the whole thing, I would have realized that Liz was only expecting us to do what we always did anyway: find books for the kids who came in and give them a comfortable place to sit. Make sure big brothers kept an eye on little sisters. Pass around date-stamps and paper. If more formal programming was called for, I could tell “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” and “Pierre” on command. (Still can.) But my thoughts are with the old place today, and I hope there is a speedy and fair resolution.

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But as a librarian, I understand that digital reference sources, done right, have it all over print. The online Britannica is no less authoritative, arguably more so because it is more quickly updated than print. It’s still browsable and inspiring of serendipity: having secured a trial subscription for the purposes of writing this editorial, I’m having trouble keeping myself on task. Wikipedia without shame! Less expensive (given you have the means to access it, which is a big given) than print and more compact—what’s not to like?

Here is the question for children’s book people, though. Does the thought of a kid whizzing his or her way around an electronic reference source give us as much satisfaction as the picture of a kid doing the same thing with a printed book? I thought not. Whether librarian, teacher, publisher, or writer, when we say that at least part of our shared goal is to promote the “love of reading,” what we have always meant is the “love of books.” (Some books.) What will our goal be once books no longer provide our common core?

This is partially a question about e-books. Yes, e-books are books, and libraries want to buy them and enthusiastically promote their circulation to library patrons, who demonstrably want to read them. But publishers complain that they need “friction” to ensure that library borrowing doesn’t take too much of a bite from consumer purchases, and libraries are put into the position of licensing rather than acquiring e-books, just another borrower in the chain. However, this economic tussle is only an early warning sign of the real problem that librarians and (as Stephen Roxburgh argued in the March/April 2012 Horn Book) publishers face: thanks to the leveling power of the internet, electronic literature doesn’t need either one of us, at least as we currently understand our respective missions.

But this is also a question about the independence of readers. In libraries, even those kids who wouldn’t talk to a librarian if their lives depended on it rely far more than they know on the professional expertise provided by the library’s staff, systems, and policies. Readers’ advisory is found as much in the shelving as it is in a friendly chat. When we are reading online, however, we are far more on our own, for good (we can read what we want when we want it) or ill (finding what we want to read can be an adventure beset by false leads, commercial interests, and invasions of privacy).

What can children’s book people become? I reveal my fantasy of what we could make of the future on page 16 of this issue, but in reality what we need to do is to redefine our gatekeeping role. Along with giving up any notion that the only real reading is book reading, like the online Britannica we have to believe in our own expertise and convince others that our knowledge is worth attending to. We’ve spent more than a century dedicated to the idea that some reading is better than other reading, an elitist position we can defend by pointing to decades of excellence in books for youth. Publishers and librarians together, we made that happen. Let us continue to do so.

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Shaddup, that's Betsy on the right.

This coming Saturday, I’ll be introducing my old friend Betsy Hearne at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, where she will be delivering the Barbara Elleman Research Library Lecture. 25 bucks for lunch with Betsy and me at noon; the BERL lecture (hey Barbara–how’s it feel to be an acronym?) is  at 2:00 PM and free with admission to the museum. Like Anne Carroll Moore, Bertha Mahony Miller, and Ellen Robillard O’Hara before her, Betsy Gould Hearne is a true three-named Great Lady Legend and you shouldn’t miss this chance to hear her speak.

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Barbara Bader’s “Cleveland and Pittsburgh Create a Profession” looks at a time when place really mattered and where you worked was far more allied to what you did than it is today. Certainly, you would learn from your distant colleagues via professional associations and journals, but change in librarianship happened building by building. Reading Bader’s account I’m struck by the concreteness of everything–Effie Power moving from Cleveland to Pittsburgh; Frances Olcott’s “Library Day” programs on summer playgrounds; William Howard Brett literally carving out space to make a children’s room. All of this still goes on, of course, but what will the ebook future hold? You can now go to library school from your home and check out books the same way. With public libraries currently so tied to geographically dependent funding, how will they fare as their physical location matters less and less?

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The sight of a ‘children’s room’ in a public library just after school hours is enchanting…they pour into its doors, the crowd of children, well-dressed, poorly clad, boys, girls, big, small, all with an assured air of welcome, comfortably, easily, happily at home among bookshelves as they are in no other spot. Thirty years ago nobody would have dreamed of such a golden picture as a possibility.

So wrote the novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Children’s Library Yearbook Number One, a 1929 volume reviewing what might have been called, in the idiom of the time, three decades of progress.

But specialized work with children in the burgeoning public libraries was well underway before 1899. It didn’t spread from the storied cities of the Northeast, with their intellectual eminence; it arose almost simultaneously in many scattered locales. None were more representative of the children’s library movement, however, than Cleveland and Pittsburgh—cities of the industrial heartland with large immigrant populations and, crucially, a succession of gifted, forceful librarians who met a prevailing need in a historic partnership.

William Howard Brett was an accidental librarian. Born in 1846, he repeatedly tried to enlist in the Union Army—once putting a slip of paper in his shoe inscribed with the number 18, so he could honestly say he was “over eighteen”—until, in the last year of the war, he passed muster as a drummer boy. After the war his attempt to go to college foundered for lack of funds. But he was an avid, discerning reader and made his mark selling books—first in his native Warren, Ohio, then at the big Cleveland bookstore Cobb & Andrews. When the post of city librarian became vacant in 1884, who better qualified?

The Cleveland Public Library—originally the Public School Library—was then housed on the second and third floors of Board of Education headquarters. In the circulation department, borrowers waited at a high counter for an attendant to fetch the requested books. No one under fourteen could get a card.

As a bookseller, Brett knew two big things that the cloistered librarian didn’t: the value of browsing among books and the importance of books to children. He brightened up the quarters, and made them comfortable; he cataloged the collection by the new Dewey system. And with added space, a few years later, he arranged the nonfiction in alcoves by subject and allowed readers to go to the bookcases. In a large city library, where the borrowers were strangers to the staff, open shelves were a daring innovation.

Brett had audacity. A year after taking office, he submitted an article to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, called “Books for Youth,” soliciting a donation of $5,000 (about $125,000 today) to build up a collection of reputable children’s books. Youngsters shouldn’t be reading “worthless and corrupt literature,” he wrote, because the library didn’t have enough copies of Louisa May Alcott titles to meet the demand. No concerned citizen responded, but the article was reprinted in Library Journal, with an editorial salvo, and launched Brett as a children’s library advocate. In later years, Anne Carroll Moore was reputed to have called Brett “the first great children’s librarian.” The quote may be apocryphal, but the tribute rang true, and stuck.

Brett’s polemic against trash also expressed a common sentiment. In those days, you didn’t have to be stodgy to look askance at Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore or Horatio Alger’s heroes. What enlightened grownup didn’t?

The Cleveland Library was then, like many others, serving children through the schools. But the popularity of the school collections only demonstrated to Brett “the pressing need of a system of branch libraries and delivery stations in a city so widely extended as our own.” In 1892, the library opened the first of four branches in existing buildings; from 1904 to 1914, with a grant from Andrew Carnegie, seven new libraries were constructed, with spacious, attractive children’s rooms, in key neighborhoods around the city: the neighborhood library came to be, in large part, as a place that kids could get to on their own.

At the Central Library, meanwhile, restrictions on children’s use were soon relaxed and, in 1896, the age limit was abolished altogether; to join the library, a child had only to write his or her name, and get a parent’s signature. But where were the newcomers to go? Brett’s solution was to partition off the largest of the alcoves, and cut a door into the corridor. In this makeshift space—with high bookcases around the walls, and upper shelves reached by a ladder that children propelled (to their delight) by pushing with a foot—Effie Louise Power was installed as librarian. In later years, Power liked to speak of herself as “Mr. Brett’s first children’s librarian.” He had recruited her himself, out of high school—making her, according to youth services historian Christine Jenkins, the first person “hired specifically for children’s work.”

Brett made another significant hire in Linda Eastman, who became vice-librarian in 1896 and shared his interest in children. The next year, Eastman and Power launched the Children’s Library League to encourage respect for books and teach their proper care. There was also a reading component—children made lists of the books they read, for posting as suggestions for others. The first year’s program climaxed spectacularly with a mass meeting in the city’s largest auditorium.

At the American Library Association conference that year, when Brett was president, Eastman presented a paper on the program—one of many contributions to ALA affairs that Cleveland librarians made regularly through the formative years of children’s services. They did groundbreaking work, they wrote about it for professional journals, they shared their experience with colleagues. A new profession was rapidly taking shape.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, by contrast with its counterpart in Cleveland, sprang “almost full-grown from the mind and purse” of its namesake, as a later director wrote. The central building opened in 1895, and within five years there were five large neighborhood branches, with three more soon to follow. In 1898, Frances Jenkins Olcott was hired to oversee service to children in the growing system, the first in the country to hold such a post.

In Cleveland, Effie Power had been tapped to be a children’s librarian, and later got professional training. Frances Olcott had professional training (at the New York State Library School, the nation’s first) and might be called a children’s librarian incarnate. She had spent her early years in France, where her father was in the consular service; she’d been homeschooled by parents steeped in the traditional literature of Germany and France. She had a sense of drama.

She was also a force—on fertile, uncharted ground. The Progressivism of the period imbued librarians with a social mission to elevate the masses. In cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, that meant both the majority of children who were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and the school-leavers—the overwhelming number who didn’t get past the eighth grade, if they got that far.

No child left out, might have been the motto. With a strong, supportive director, Olcott instituted one after another “experiment”—her word—in extending the library’s reach. There was storytelling in all the branches: cycles of myths and legends for the older children, fairy tales for the younger ones. By 1905–06, more than 600 stories were told to over 400 groups of children. There was Library Day once a week at the summer playgrounds, a cozy introduction to books away from the branches. “The ‘little mothers’ invariably saved a place on their cards for a book to please the baby brother or sister tugging at their skirts,” a librarian reported, “or for some older member at home.”

There were also programs, such as the “Home Library,” tailored to the time and place. A neat bookcase with “a small, carefully selected collection of attractively bound and illustrated books” was kept in a neighborhood home. The oldest child in that family usually served as librarian, recording the books borrowed and returned at the group’s weekly meeting. There, a “friendly visitor” led the group of ten to twelve youngsters in an informal program of games, storytelling, and group discussion. Before long the groups ranged across the city and covered the ethnic map.

All of this was labor-intensive work, and much of it was performed by students at the Training School for Children’s Librarians, housed in the Central Library. Founded in 1899 as a training class to meet pressing local needs, it emerged in 1901 as a professional, certificate-granting school, with (eventually) both one- and two-year programs and more than half its students from outside the Pittsburgh area. A few had four-year college degrees; a few already had library experience. The next year the school enrolled graduates of Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr; it had “special students”—working librarians—from the New York Public Library and from Cleveland, Des Moines, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Mansfield, Ohio; already, its graduates were working as far afield as Galveston, Texas.

Frances Olcott was the head of this booming operation, as she was of children’s services, and the instructors were drawn from the library staff. The course of study, that first year, ranged from the basics of ordering and cataloging, to children’s literature and storytelling, to school-library relations and Home Libraries, to “psychology” and “civic education.” (“Psychology” meant reading the childhood portraits of Dickens and Spyri and Ewing, not “analysis of the children themselves.”) Then there was the practice work: “presenting various [facets] of the cosmopolitan life of a fast-growing industrial city.” And, increasingly, there were visiting lecturers: in 1914–15, the roster included Caroline Hewins, Alice Jordan, Anne Carroll Moore, and Boy Scout Librarian Franklin Mathiews. No one prominent in the field escaped.

Olcott’s reign over library and school ended abruptly in 1911, when an “insurrection” by library school students—in the words of the library director—led to her dismissal. Yes, she could be a prima donna. She didn’t lose her standing in the profession, however, and it was she who was asked to write the section on “Library Work with Children” for ALA’s 1914 Manual of Library Economy.

In 1916, the Training School became the Carnegie Library School, and soon courses of study for school librarians and general librarians were added. But it remained preeminent, under the new name, as a wellspring of work with children. In school and library conjoined, Pittsburgh had talent in depth.

One of the special students in the Training School had been Cleveland’s Effie Power—about to move from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to St. Louis and back to Pittsburgh, where she eventually became one of Olcott’s successors. For her successor as head of children’s services in Cleveland, Power recommended Caroline Burnite, from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library and the Training School faculty. At that time, in 1904, the Cleveland Library’s great expansion was just beginning; by 1915, the library exuberantly reported a juvenile circulation of “thirteen times as many books as there are children in Cleveland of the reading age.” They got those books from the new branch libraries, where the children’s rooms averaged more than seventy seats (and some had over a hundred); but they borrowed them, as well, from far-flung stand-alone collections.

With her Pittsburgh experience, Burnite also established a Training Class for Children’s Librarians—where, students testified, her standards and beliefs, along with her commanding presence, marked them for life.

All the pathfinders were serious about children’s reading. Up with the classics, down with popular fiction. Down with fiction, up with nonfiction. Burnite thought, simultaneously, of the one and the many. “No books weak in social ideals should be furnished, provided we do not lose reading children by their elimination.” So some “mediocre” books should remain, from which children could be guided upward; the “reading ladder” was her idea. Similarly, older boys and girls should graduate to adult books as soon as they were ready, and every children’s room was provided with some. A boy reading an Alger-like sea story, for example, might be introduced to Captains Courageous—as, aptly, “the story of a rich boy who fell overboard from an ocean liner and was picked up by the crew of a fishing yacht.” The sequence concludes with Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, which Burnite describes as “difficult reading…[to] be used with discrimination.”

It’s become commonplace in recent times to characterize early librarians and editors as “guardians” or “minders” interested only in foisting middle-class standards on their charges. Rather, they saw good books as a path to freedom—a way of broadening minds, deepening sympathies, sharpening perceptions. Midway in the Burnite years in Cleveland, William Brett was killed in a freak streetcar accident and Linda Eastman, by his side at the time, became his successor—the first woman to head a major city library. In 1919, Burnite resigned to get married, and Effie Power returned to Cleveland for a second, golden stretch as head of children’s work.

In Pittsburgh, Power had a complement in Elva S. Smith, a serious woman of letters. Smith had graduated from the first training class in 1903, with varied California experience behind her, and she immediately became a presence as instructor in the school and cataloger at the library. Over the next four decades, Smith taught everything in the juvenile field—book selection, cataloging, bibliography, history of children’s literature and development of children’s work—and ultimately became head of the children’s department. She wrote the book, literally, on cataloging children’s books and compiled a remarkable syllabus, with full bibliographies, for the teaching of children’s lit from King Alfred to Kipling. The History of Children’s Literature, first published in 1937, was reprinted by ALA as late as 1980. Her students—in the library world and in publishing—were legion.

While Elva Smith was mining the past in Pittsburgh, Effie Power was looking ahead. “Our task is to reach all the children,” she said at ALA in 1925, and “to establish permanent interests; to train them to read books and to love books; and to relate their use of books and their general reading to their lives.” The next year she launched the Book Caravan, bringing the mobile library from the countryside to the city. “It…has a value as publicity when seen passing through the streets,” Power wrote, as well as usefulness in “carrying library materials to the indifferent.” Library administration and librarian training were specialties of Power’s; and Pittsburgh library school students routinely did their practicums in Cleveland. So did others, by choice—among them Mildred Batchelder, the future ALA children’s specialist, then a student at the New York State Library School. Unsurprisingly, Power was tapped by ALA, in 1930, to write the first textbook on Library Service for Children.

The 1920s was a period of relative plenty when children’s librarians, consolidating their gains, began to exert influence outside their immediate communities.  They had money to spend, or withhold, for books, and publishers listened. They had social concerns, as well, and the ability to advance them. In those interlocking areas, Power was, well, a power. When she protested racist usage in Doctor Dolittle, the author and publisher made the desired change; when she questioned Langston Hughes, whose work she had championed, on a harsh phrase in an essay, he found a solution satisfactory to both of them.

The combination of past and present in children’s librarianship can be encapsulated in Smith’s scholarship and Power’s activism.

The last scene brings most of the principals back on stage—writing or editing the kinds of books they wanted kids to read. Books of traditional literature, mainly: collections of fairy tales and folk tales, of myths and legends; anthologies of poetry; compilations of holiday verse and lore. Olcott was the most prolific, turning out some two dozen volumes over the years, but Smith and Power contributed their share. All told, children’s librarians had produced almost ninety children’s books by 1929, including some original fiction, according to Children’s Library Yearbook Number One. Several of the other authors hailed from Cleveland or Pittsburgh, or both.

Singly and together, Cleveland and Pittsburgh created children’s services from the ground up, and then showed others how. It was an inspired work—inspired, it’s fair to say, by the children. A 1922 report from a Cleveland branch reports on a neighborhood “two-thirds Hungarian, with an admixture of Bohemian, Jewish, Italian and American borrowers—good readers all.”

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September/October 2011

Barbara Bader’s series of articles on the “second generation” of prominent librarians in the children’s services field (“Virginia Haviland,” January/February 2011; “Augusta Baker,” May/June 2011; “Mildred Batchelder,” September/October 2011) has been enjoyable to read. For the small number of us who worked with these librarians or knew them, Bader stirs up some especially fine memories. Her account of Mildred Batchelder’s antipathy to the legendary Anne Carroll Moore was personally entertaining since Mildred once gave me a similar earful about Moore. At the time she was recently retired but still always interested in those of us coming along in the field.

Bader notes Batchelder’s reference to Moore as a “small figure” and goes on to note that the two women were similar in many ways. She doesn’t note the matter of similarity in size, though she quotes Dorothy Broderick’s first meeting with a “pert little lady” named Mildred Batchelder. Ah, yes! These two were both diminutive in physical stature and very large in influence. Furthermore, these attributes were shared by several notable women in the first and second generation of leaders in children’s librarianship, including Virginia Haviland.

It occurred to me long ago that there was a whole pantheon of tiny, prominent women among these early leaders. Charlemae Rollins of Chicago, honored annually at the ALSC president’s program, was a widely known contemporary of Augusta Baker’s, sharing both her early championship of books reflecting African American experience and her passion for storytelling. Tiny Charlemae was a magnificent figure as a storyteller! Zena Sutherland, also of Chicago and long known as a teacher and critic, gave us the review journal The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and then revised several editions of that hefty textbook, Children and Books, first created by May Hill Arbuthnot. Small Zena was firm, thoughtful, and articulate in her children’s book views. (Take it from a much larger librarian who once had to argue with her as a paired speaker at an ALA conference program on nonfiction.) Another notable and small librarian/teacher/critic was Ethel Heins, once editor of The Horn Book. Also strong and passionate in her views, Ethel brought a deep, wide book knowledge and a welcome sense of humor in urging us to high standards in the creation and selection of books for children.

Two other diminutive women played significant roles in my own career. Mae Durham joined the faculty of the graduate library school at UC–Berkeley, teaching the one all-purpose course in children’s literature and library services the year I was a student there. Steeped in the New York Public Library tradition of Anne Carroll Moore, Mae sent a significant number of her students across the country to start their careers, actively engaging herself in regional and national arenas of children’s services. Another tiny librarian of long commitment in these areas was the children’s librarian of my own early days as a library user, Winifred Ragsdale. I didn’t know her well then, but always loved it that she never interfered with a child’s desire to just be allowed solitary personal time in her library. Many years into my professional career, I appointed her to a committee when I served as president of ALSC. Subsequently, she chaired a program committee that invited me to be a keynote speaker at the Pacific Rim Conference on Children’s Literature, held in Los Angeles in 1986. What fun I had telling her I had been a first-grade child she had served in her first job as a children’s librarian!

I suspect other readers have tales of small but mighty leaders in children’s librarianship. At just five feet—a bit less or a bit more—they really were profound in their influence. I suppose one might explore the sociological or psychological ramifications of all this, though I haven’t been tempted to try. Their size may have been immaterial, but it has always intrigued me that there were quite a few of them awhile back, whereas we hardly ever see that particular feature in the subsequent generations of leaders of children’s librarianship.

Margaret Bush
Boston, Massachusetts

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At a time when so many books are being published, it is perhaps paradoxical to insist that they need help. Not all books: lots of them do just fine without professional attention, even flourishing exactly because the grownups don’t approve. (I worry sometimes that our generally admirable laissez-faire attitude toward children’s reading choices as well as the current adult enthusiasm for YA have had the unfortunate side effect of giving young readers less room to rebel.) Then there are the books kids and adults read with equal enjoyment—did you catch Phil and Claire talking about The Book Thief on Modern Family?

But let us here consider the books in need—those books for youth that make librarians both happy and industrious. When I look at our 2011 Fanfare list, beginning on page 10, I see an array of thirty books whose fortunes will largely depend on you. Yes, some of the choices have already established themselves (Press Here and I Want My Hat Back are on this week’s New York Times bestsellers list), and good for them. But most of the books on our Fanfare list will need your attention first if they hope to find the attention of young readers.

Take Breaking Stalin’s Nose. Yes, take it, read it, and do something to bring it to the attention of another reader. Chapter books about ten-year-old boys confronting the cruelty and cynicism of Stalin’s Soviet Union do not read themselves, after all, nor do they fly off the shelves. It needed one person—me—to bring it to the Fanfare table; much debate and discussion later, it needs another person—you—to help it flourish. Or maybe Breaking Stalin’s Nose is not the book for you; there are twenty-nine other titles that merit attention and dissemination. Pick one or several and go forth.

The selections on this list range from books for the youngest (A Ball for Daisy, Where’s Walrus?) to those for the oldest (Life: An Exploded Diagram, Feynman); and on subjects including dogs, bears, ghosts, fairy horses, history, families, artists, scientists, and bloody noses. Beyond being within the parameter of books published in 2011 for children and teens, they have only one thing in common. Someone on our review or editorial staff loved a book enough and was so convinced of its potential worth to others that she or he kept insisting the rest of us read it. Again, if necessary. The Fanfare list includes those thirty titles (out of some five hundred reviewed by the Magazine this year) for which one reader’s enthusiasm (and powers of persuasion) successfully created a fellowship of like-minded souls. Your turn.

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“One of the ways in which we demonstrate disrespect for children is by having triple standards–one for them, one for adults using the library, and one for the library staff. I have attended meetings of librarians devoted to discussing the uproar young people create in libraries and then seen us create more noise leaving the meeting room than any group of children ever did. Yet we did not feel our natural exuberance and enjoyment of being with each other was an assault upon the order of the library hosting us. We were not maliciously disrupting the library or deliberately annoying its patrons–but whatever our motivation, we were doing both. Where too many of us go astray in dealing with children is that we attribute to them malicious intent. Once we come to believe that they are deliberately misbehaving, it becomes easy to go the next step and order, ‘Get out!’ Such behavior on our part serves to declare war.”

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The question of app and ebook accessibility across economic classes came up several times in the Librarians and Digital Storytelling Twitter Party that Kitty and I e-attended last month. The Common Sense Media study highlights media usage within the household (by surveying parents), but librarians in our conversation pointed out a similar gap due to lack of library and school system funding for devices and apps and ebooks.

Some said that their libraries were able to provide ebooks for use on desktop computers, but not tablet-based apps since their budget could not accommodate purchasing devices. In a kind of BYO-iPad movement, many of the librarians bring their personal devices from home to share with young patrons. Others have devices, but no budget for content; they get around this problem by using only free apps or free previews (often called the “lite version”).

We can all agree that efforts to get books into the hands of disadvantaged children are worthy and important. Is it equally critical to close the app gap?

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