The Importance of Libraries

Recently, it feels that libraries everywhere are under siege. A recent BBC story reported that  343 libraries in Britain have closed in the past six years, and 111 are slated for closure in the next year. Britain has lost 25% of its library staff in that same period, and there is a worrying trend that professional librarians are being replaced with volunteers. In fact, 174 public libraries in Britain are now run entirely by volunteers. A year ago, I would have said that this couldn't happen in Canada, but we recently learned that the government of Newfoundland and Labrador plans to close 54 of their 95 public libraries in the next two years.

In the midst of all of this doom and gloom, it's important t remind ourselves that there are people out there who feel that public libraries provide vital services to our communities, and they are willing to stand up and say so. One of these is the author Neil Gaiman. In a speech for a U.K. charity called the Reading Agency in 2013, he talked about the importance of reading and how visiting his local public library as a child turned him into a lifelong reader. He writes:

I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader - nothing less and more - which meant they treated me with respect. 

Gaiman goes further and outlines what he feels is the central role of a public library.  Libraries, he says, are places that people go for information, free information.  Books are just "the tip of the information iceberg":

 A library is a place that is a repository of, and gives every citizen equal access to, information. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

It's a wonderful speech and worth reading in its entirety.  You can see it (or listen to it) online here. It's time we all spoke up for libraries.

Summer Reading Loss

With summer around the corner, our minds turn to sunshine, gardens, barbeques and beaches. At the library, we have our minds on summer reading loss.

Students and teachers work diligently during the school year to improve vocabulary and literacy skills. Once school stops, though, that learning can also halt. Research has shown repeatedly that a summer without reading often means starting from scratch when school starts again in September. There is an estimated three month achievement gap between students who do and do not read during the summer. Between grades one and six, this works out to approximately 1.5 years of lost reading development (Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996).

So how do we encourage summer reading?

For starters, let’s remind ourselves that reading should be fun! During the school year, student may have “required reading,” but summer should mean recreational reading. Comic books, graphic novels, magazines and newspapers may not be traditional formats, but we’re still engaging in literacy when we read them. During the summer, let your children read what they gravitate towards, even if the format or content isn’t considered “high brow.”

No matter how old your children are, our core early literacy concepts still prove valuable: read, talk, write, sing and play. Encourage your children to keep a journal during the summer. Read aloud to them at the beach, or keep books on hands at the family cottage. Listening to Taylor Swift in the car can expand our vocabulary too – sing along!

Finally, you can register your children in the TD Summer Reading Club at the library. Participants simply record how long they read during the summer for their chance to win free books. We’ll also be building a Tower of Books this year: for every piece of literature a child reads, a book will be added to the tower. Can the kids of Collingwood read more than the staff at the library?

There are all kinds of ways to encourage literacy during the summer. We want everyone to read ahead, not fall behind.

Happy summer reading!

--Ashley Kulchycki

References:

Cooper, H., Nye, B., Charlton, K., Lindsay, J., & Greathouse, S. (1996). The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research, 66, 227-268.