At “No Place to Hide: Whistleblowers Expose the Surveillance State,” a program held at the 2015 ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco, Greenwald discussed the reverberations of his work with Snowden, the importance of privacy, and the failure of the mainstream media to hold the US government accountable for its actions. Participating via … Continue reading No Place to Hide
Rebecca Miller, library director at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, and Leila Gibradze, an instructor librarian at Florida State University who hails from Georgia, shared their experiences living and working outside of the United States, detailing the issues, challenges, and needs affecting librarians and libraries, as well as everyday people, in Afghanistan and … Continue reading Serving Abroad
President Feldman thanked Past President Young, and presented her with a Tiffany bracelet on behalf of the Association as the audience gave Young a standing ovation. Libraries Transform, a new public awareness campaign to elevate the ways libraries support individual opportunity and community progress, was the focus of new ALA President Sari Feldman’s speech at … Continue reading New Public Awareness Campaign Announced
Presenters Erinn Batykefer, program coordinator at New Canaan (Conn.) Library, Kara West, library arts and culture exhibition manager at San Diego Public Library, and Rebecca Hopman, outreach librarian at the Corning (N.Y.) Museum of Glass cited Madison (Wis.) Public Library’s 2012 Bookless art event, in which the library invited more than 100 artists to create … Continue reading Becoming a Part of Art
ALA President Courtney Young opened the Council III meeting at 7:45 on June 30, and former ALA President Barbara Stripling announced it closed just before 10 a.m., with numerous actions and reports. Council members stood as memorials were read for Gail A. Schlachter, David Cohen, Charles Benton, Cynthia D. Clark, Ruth C. Carter, William Vernon … Continue reading Council III Memorials and Actions
Nancy Andrus, youth services librarian at Sunnyvale, found a way to reverse this trend: #LadyMakers. She described her experiences in a Sunday Conversation Starter session. Andrus recruited five ladymakers to help lead the library’s Make-HER program from nearby museum and education programs and told them that it was as much about them as individuals as … Continue reading From Maker to Make-HER: STEM Exploration for Girls
Manzano said the character of Maria has paralleled her life—her pregnancy was written into the show, and her daughter played Maria’s daughter, for example—so she thinks of Sesame Street as the “first reality show.” But as a writer on the show, she had a little more control over Maria’s reality than she did over her … Continue reading Sonia Manzano: Becoming Maria
At Monday’s “Diverse Books Need Us” program, four panelists—an author, a small publisher, a librarian, and a nonprofit advocate—talked about this topic and ways in which librarians can support the call for more diverse books. Joy Triche, founder of Tiger Stripe Publishing, started the company because she “felt the absence of diverse books for many … Continue reading Diverse Books Need Us
Panelist Hannah Gomez, a librarian at an all-girl school, has found that there’s a tiny stack of “authorized” books about boys that her students are willing to read. “If it’s about a boy and not by John Green, they’re not interested.” With young adult books, girl books are expected to have romance, boy books have action … Continue reading Fart Jokes and Feelings
Whenever she’s with librarians, she said she thinks of a Richard Wright essay titled “The Library Card,” in which Wright gets a white coworker to lend him a library card and then forges notes to borrow a book. The notes say things like, “Will you let this boy borrow some books by H. L. Mencken?” … Continue reading Edwidge Danticat: The Power of Books and Librarians
In the first video, he discusses the picture books he grew up with and their evocative powers, as well as his own writing process and how he engages young readers’ imaginations. In the second video, Klassen talks about visiting schools, encouraging students to draw and write, and the roles that librarians can play in connecting … Continue reading An Interview with Caldecott Winner Jon Klassen
In the library world, data drives almost everything we do. It is at the core of cataloging, it’s essential to collection development, and it is the demographics that we collect and analyze in order to learn more about our patrons and our communities. But while many librarians are expert data gatherers, it can be a … Continue reading By the Numbers
