The Librarian's Lounge

Alumni blues

I received what looked like a bill the other day from my alma mater but turned out to be an uber-smart marketing ploy to lure me into believing I owed the UofA money to pay for my alumni membership. This reminded me- I had been meaning to sign up for the alumni membership so that I could get a discounted annual university library card and continue to use their electronic databases for all my informational needs. Lo and behold, the university library policy has changed and alumni cards no longer provide access to their subscription databases. Rats. Turns out my other alma mater has changed their policy in the same way. I can't think of any good reason to sign up for either now. I am so bummed.

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Re-thinking Position Titles

Something that came up recently in a class discussion was the term "school library media specialist" and its being outdated. It was felt that the title is outdated and more relevant to the 1980's, when school librarians handled overhead projectors and other such things. This person advocated the use of the term "teacher-librarian" in its place. And she's not the only one.

My feelings on this are mixed. First, I had no idea that this title had been around for so long. I thought it was a relatively new term that referred to media as in multimedia. There's no denying how much of every modern librarian's day is spent on computer-related phenomena and certainly school librarians spend much time providing instruction in the classroom on things like navigating websites and databases.

But when I read something like this article from the January issue of American Libraries in which librarians are being grouped with counselors and student transportation, when it comes to school budgets, instead of with teachers where they rightly belong, I blow a gasket. As stated in the article,

"the 65 Percent Solution defines as classroom costs the same functions so designated by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Among the services relegated to “outside-the-classroom” overhead are principals, school nurses, counselors, student transportation, teacher training—and school library media specialists."

A quote from the President of Overstock.com and chairman of First Class Education, says:

“ ‘In the Classroom' education includes most anything that directly impacts the child … whether teaching a child to read a book, read Braille, read music or read a football defensive pass pattern.”

Note that the very first example is teaching a child to read a book. But according to this plan, libraries don't fall into the teacher category and therefore have to compete with buses, principals, and psychologists for budget dollars, thereby effectively removing librarians and libraries from the literacy equation.

The weird thing about the Arizona commercial for the First Education plan is that it mentions extra funds for "more books," showing an image of a library in the background. And, ironically, the NCES homepage has an prominent advertisement for locating public library information at its site.

I was therefore heartened when our very own Arizona State Library's Gladys Ann Wells was mentioned in the American Libraries article (only in the print edition), as having sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings that "urged Department of Education to correct the 'crippling effect of the outmoded federal accounting definition separating K-12 librarians from the classroom category." This letter resulted in a meeting between representatives of Margaret Spellings with Colorado state librarian Eugene Hainer and Texas State Library's Peggy Rudd, in which they spoke about "redefining the work school library media specialists as a classroom cost," citing the Reading First program of the No Child Left Behind Act, which lists school librarians as instructional staff.

Clearly, one of two things needs to happen. Either "school library media specialists" need to be incorporated into the 65% figure, or they need to change their title to "teacher-librarian" in order to obtain the funding they deserve as instructional specialists. Whereas I don't particularly see anything wrong with the old title, there is obviously something wrong if it conveys a perception that librarians are not teachers and therefore don't deserve to be funded as such.