When kids play, they use their imaginations. When kids watch a video screen, they’re hypnotized and use less of their imaginations, receiving everything passively. So it’s kind of scary to read a report in USAToday about a study from Daniel Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who monitored how toddlers behaved when Jeopardy - a show that presumably offers toddlers little that interests them - was on a television set in the room.

The article says:

Perhaps most significant: When the TV was on, kids of all ages played with a given toy — a jack-in-the-box, a baby doll, blocks, a toy telephone, a school bus with toy passengers — for about 30 seconds, on average. Without TV, it was 60 seconds.

This may not seem significant, but when a TV is on in the room with young children, it means that children’s attention spans are broken up, and kids are engaging in less, and more fragmented, imaginative play.

I’m concerned that as kids grow older and become more and more fixated on screens - in particular, the Net and video games - they use less and less of their imaginations and let their brains fall under the direction of Web designers and game designers. Is this okay? I dunno, but somehow I doubt it. How much time are the children visiting your library spending in front of screens, or checking out items they’ll see on screens?

If, like me, you don’t read a lot of the children’s publishing blogs and newsgroups, you might miss a fascinating New Yorker article by Jill Lepore called “The Lion and the Mouse.” It’s about the almighty Anne Carroll Moore of a bygone era, the original grande dame of children’s librarianship, who from her post “behind the lions” of the New York Public Library’s big main building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, established children’s librarianship, but also, for better or worse, passed judgment on children’s books published during much of the first half of the 20th century.

If you’ve never heard Moore’s story but work with kids in libraries, you should read this piece, because Moore had a big influence on how children’s books were written, illustrated, and promoted, and her influence continues. You can see a lot of the beginnings of children’s literature criticism in the article, too. Here also is the story of E.B. White, his wife Katharine - an early children’s book critic - and his first children’s book, the immortal Stuart Little.

Moore encouraged White to write it, but then ended up offended by the way White had mixed up fantasy and reality. A woman giving birth to an anthropomorphic mouse? Moore asked Harper, its publisher, and White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, not to release it. “I never was so disappointed in a book in my life,” Moore said.

It’s definitely worth your time. And there was a quote that caught my eye and drew me away for a few moments on a completely different path. Lepore writes:

Children’s literature, at least in the West, is utterly bound up in the medieval, as Seth Lerer, a Stanford literature professor, argues in “Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter.” Lots of books for kids are about the Middle Ages (everything from “The Hobbit” to “Robin Hood” and “Redwall”), but the conventions of the genre (allegory, moral fable, romance, and heavy-handed symbolism) are also themselves distinctly premodern. It’s not only that many books we shelve as “children’s literature”—Grimms’ Fairy Tales or “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Huck Finn”—were born as biting political satire, for adults; it’s also that books written for children in the twentieth century tend to be distinctly, willfully, and often delightfully antimodern. “The Phantom Tollbooth” has more in common with “The Pilgrim’s Progress” than it does with “On the Road.”

As I wandered around the publisher’s booths at the ALA Conference, I noticed that so many new books are fantasies - and I mean books for children, teens, and adults. (Have you noticed how many vampire romances appeared in the wake of Anne Rice? The Midnight series brought them to kids and teens, but now it seems as if there are hundreds, for all ages.) And have you noticed how little science fiction is being published and read these days? I feel that there’s something in so many modern middle-class Americans these days that longs for a good king who can command something and everyone must obey, or wizards who can wave wands and make wishes come true, and even vampires who can love us and protect us in this raggedy world. Science fiction reminds us too much of the pervasive technology that seems to be slowly strangling us as it daily transforms the world, and that so many people feel they can’t keep up with.

This is why I keep going on about the importance of libraries supporting literacy and the printed word. No medium develops our imaginations and stretches us the way the printed word can, whether we want to escape to a vampire romance or an article about global warming. But I digress.

Several times, I’ve pointed out the Reading Rockets site from WETA Public TV as a good place for library folks who work with kids to visit. I wanted to point out a couple of worthwhile articles on Reading Rockets that you might find worth a read.

One is called “Making Reading Relevant: Read, Learn, and Do!” For adults working with K-3 kids, it offers several activities that turn what’s in a book into a real experience. Don’t pass up any chance to let parents and other caregivers know that “making reading relevant,” putting printed words together with large motor skill activities and 3-D objects, is one of the most important things they can do - especially for boys, who are often behind girls in language development skills, and especially for kids whose parents have less education.

Making reading “relevant” makes the difference between a child who gives up on reading by the fourth grade and one who becomes fascinated with learning about new things through print.

Here’s another, called “Use Summer Fun to Build Background Knowledge.” One of the biggest problems children from lower-income families face in school is a lack of “background knowledge” - the basic information about how the world works that many school lessons, and books, assume that children of a particular age already have. But not all - particularly those kids who have gained most of what they know sitting and watching cartoons on video most days - may know things such as that the earth rotates around the sun and the moon around the earth, or how plants grow from seeds.

If you haven’t looked at Reading Rockets yet, pay a visit. It’s a great way to pick up lots of child development and literacy tidbits - the kind you can pick up and then pass along - quickly and pretty painlessly.

I mentioned a few posts ago about the Austin Public Library Bibliofiles, our book cart drill team, which won the silver at the ALA Book Cart Drill Team Championships in Anaheim. Here’s a story from one of our local Austin TV news sites, so that you can learn more about them.

And here’s a video of their routine:

Book cart drill teams are a great way to get any library - school, public, or otherwise - “noticed” in any community. Every town and city has parades and festivals, and once a book cart drill team works up a few routines, why not do something to break out of those old stereotypes?

And then, you can, as the Bibliofiles did, post the video to YouTube so that everyone in your community can see it.

Back in the 90s, I was heavily involved in the idea that one way librarians could find their new role in the new century was by creating directories of great Web sites. I was one of the members of the ALA/ALSC committee that created the Great Web Sites for Kids in 1997.

We worked very hard setting policies for how this directory would work, and carefully composed the page of Great Web Sites for Kids Selection Criteria. Why? Because we were hoping that libraries nationwide would use it as a model and create and promote similar sites of their own. The logic we used went something like this: Libraries select and organize books. They select and organize recordings, magazines, and other media.

We felt that the Web was the ultimate disorganized mess o’media. Since we’re now bringing the Internet into libraries, we said, why not establish selection criteria and best practices for how to present and recommend the best Web sites for young users? We felt that, just as we used the exact titles of books on our catalog records, that we should use both the title of the site that appeared in the title bar (i.e., the <title> ) and the full Web address in each description.

Plus, you need to remember that this period was when conservative talk radio was going on about how harmful the unmediated Internet could be for children, with all those porn photos popping up unexpectedly. We wanted to create a directory that concerned parents could use to find thoroughly vetted sites that were age-appropriate.

It seemed like a good, forward-thinking idea at the time. But it failed, because Google just became too good. It required less effort than any directory or other search tool, and overwhelmed everything else.

The Great Web Sites remains a useful list for librarians and educators, and an ALSC committee keeps it up and going nicely. Several public libraries have also created some very good collections of Web sites for use by kids and teens. Although a good number of libraries have produced good kids’ Web directories, here are the ones I think are best - the New York City area libraries’ homeworkNYC and Multnomah County (OR) Library’s Homework Center. And do you remember KidsClick, which began at New York State’s Ramapo Catskill Library System?

All of these were created by collecting the assignments that kids most often received, and librarians researching the sites that met those assignments’ needs. They’re kept up, and are definitely worth linking to.

But after the 90s ended and the 00s began, it grew clear that Google had developed into a finely honed enough tool that kids learned quickly that they could find a site or two with the answers to almost all their homework questions. Sometimes the sites weren’t authoritative, but the kids - and all too often their teachers - seemed willing enough to accept just about anything they found on Google. The need for carefully vetted directories no longer seemed necessary, so these directories aren’t used anywhere near as much as they deserve to be used.

And lots of young people, teachers, and parents don’t know about them. We librarians have never done a good job of publicizing what we offer online - partly because we just don’t have the kind of cash it takes to compete with big commercial enterprises, but also because librarians tend not to make much noise. How many of your users know about your magazine and newspaper databases? Not all that many, I’ll bet, and it’s the same for these homework sites.

Those days are pretty much done, since it’s hard for a tax-funded library to compete against Google. But I’ll never regret the many hours I spent - and the many more hours that other librarians I know spent - on compiling these sites in the hope that libraries could take a more active role in creating a “collection” of Web sites for young people.

(Why am I writing about this? I just looked at a page called 100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of. It’s a curious convocation of sites for children and adults - some of them now out of date and others a little bizarre - but jeez, it took me back… )

This morning I visited LISNews and found a post, “The future of libraries - no MLS needed?” written by Christopher Kiess, an Ohio hospital librarian. Kiess speculates whether the nature of library work, public library work in particular, has changed so significantly that the MLS degree won’t be seen as important for work in a library much longer.

Here’s his core argument:

The library is becoming less and less of an entity requiring an MLS degreed person to manage it. As cataloging becomes outsourced, clerks become prevalent and we see a variety of other disciplines working in a library, the MLS becomes devalued. I had a respected colleague suggest to me not too long ago that a public library requires an MBA more than an MLS. I would agree. What is at issue here is the skill set of the librarian and that is a central factor in whether we can save our profession.

Kiess says that as long as people in the Google era conceive of the major function of a librarian as helping people find books, CDs, or DVDs on the shelf - even if it’s the “right” book, or CD, or DVD - they’re not seeing us as much different from the non-MLS’ed clerks at Borders. The difference comes in the full variety of services we provide. Librarians who serve youth can make the argument that because libraries are about literacy, and that because we are trained in the ages and stages of literacy, we can offer advice and counseling to parents, teachers, and children that goes beyond what a bookstore clerk can provide.

In the 21st century, every child needs to know how to read well to be successful. The pressure on our schools to make all children literate will only grow as the years pass, and libraries play an essential supporting role, even when the Net seems to have stolen away much of our old “homework-support” function. We’re the ones leading the way in setting babies, toddlers, and preschoolers on that road, and we support kids’ reading through the summers. (And - see below - gaming may increase our future role with teens.) I think the argument will, in the long run, be tougher to prove for librarians working with adults.

That means, of course, that we all need to be making noise. We need to be offering programming that pulls literacy together with the materials in our collections. Youth librarians need to be offering “literacy counseling” to parents who come in and ask us questions about the best materials for their children. We need to be more than the greeters that some public libraries seem to be moving their staff toward.

Oh - and here’s a great piece of news that’s exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen. I’ve crabbed a bit in the past about why we’re doing so many gaming programs in libraries for teens, when the relationship between gaming and literacy isn’t - at least for my curmudgeonly self - clear. Here’s an ALA press release announcing that the Verizon Foundation has awarded ALA a $1 million (!) grant to develop best practices for gaming activities in libraries. Here’s what it says:

“Gaming is a magnet that attracts library users of all types and, beyond its entertainment value, has proven to be a powerful tool for literacy and learning,” said ALA President Loriene Roy. “Through the Verizon Foundation’s gift, ALA’s gaming for learning project will provide the library community with vital information and resources that will model and help sustain effective gaming programs and services.”

I hope we do get some good ideas and programs out of this grant. Anything that builds the link between literacy and libraries in the collective mind of the public is exactly what we need to demonstrate that librarians do essential, professional-level work.

Here’s a post titled, “Are books history?” on the InfoWorld blog by Sean McCown; while it sounds as if he’s crowing for the triumph of e-books, I think he’s really asking, “Are tech books history?” And to that I say, “Hooray!”

McCown makes software and Net training videos, and he’s been seeing more and more requests for video podcasts that allow people who need to learn tech procedures to learn them quickly and easily. He says:

Let’s face it. With podcasts becoming more ubiquitous in IT, and with screencasts (like with Camtasia) becoming more and more engaging and popular, do we really need books anymore? Wouldn’t you rather learn by watching someone actually DO it?

What I think he means is: “Do we need those big fat tree-killer computer manuals any more?” The answer, of course, is “no way.” How many of those big fat phonebooks that train people in Macromedia Dreamweaver or Windows 98 or other out-of-date software do you still have on your shelves? Macromedia, of course, has not existed for a while - Adobe bought the company in 2005 - and of course, Windows 98 was about three operating systems ago.

But lots of libraries keep those big bricks of books on their 000 shelves just in case someone wants them - which they almost never do. I just weeded our software shelves and threw these books out, but I’ll bet plenty of other libraries still own them.

Computer books and printed instructions were inferior to seeing someone fix your tech problem from day one; we only used them back in 1995 or 1998 because there was nothing better or more reliable back then when we had to solve a problem on our own. And, of course, lots of kids never read them at all to begin with - or watched the videos, either; they just waded in and solved the mysteries of a new piece of software by trial and error.

I, for one, will be glad when we no longer need to buy or own those fat computer books that go stale so quickly, but sometimes (like when your Net connection goes out and you must get back online) they can be lifesavers. Videos, if they’re well-made, are much more effective than print for things that can be recorded and can demonstrate, step by step, how to operate your PC and use your software. But, unless I’ve misread his point here, it sounds as if McCown has carried on to suggest that books (I mean books in general) are on their way out because a tech-instruction video is better than a few pages in an elephantine computer manual.

Actually, I don’t think he has; but I can’t help, simply from the way he wrote the piece, daring McCown to create a video that discusses in detail the arguments between Darwinists and creationists on the kind of budget most tech trainers have. Or to describe for us on video the political forces at play in the years leading up to World War II. Or to read us a full-length novel. For the moment, there are things that print still does a whole lot better than video.

Oops… right after I said I wouldn’t write any more about the ALA conference, I read an article on the Library Journal site about a session on the future of libraries that I felt I needed to mention, even if it (superficially) had nothing to do with youth work.

The thrust of the session, which happened when I hadn’t yet arrived in Anaheim, appeared to be that librarians must feel that they’re out of the “books and materials as objects” business, and instead in the “ideas business.” The assertion intrigues me; for the average urban or suburban branch library - I’ve spent most of my career in branch libraries - day-to-day existence is totally wrapped up in books and DVDs and fines and storytimes. Nothing grand at all, and almost all of it more concrete than abstract.

I’ve always believed that libraries are in the literacy business. We don’t teach people how to read, but we do just about everything else that supports literacy and celebrates it. We need to keep that as our focus. Literacy hasn’t gone out of style - it’s more important than ever. As long as we don’t lose sight of that role in our culture, we are about as cutting-edge as you can get.

But I don’t think that these speakers were talking about aiding and abetting literacy. So I’m interested in seeing what these grand, on-the-edge ideas could be. I feel as if the issue surrounding “the future of libraries” - public libraries, anyway - is simpler; we need to learn what our users want in 2008 and provide those things. We also need to learn what the people who don’t use us need in the way of media or services that focus on literacy and do our best to provide those things, too.

I was particularly interested, though, in reading what Stephen Abram of SirsiDynix had to say about librarians, and their drive to remain anonymous:

“If we want to be treated as professionals,” he said, librarians shouldn’t wear badges that say merely “Librarian” without their name. He mocked those who say, “I don’t want to tell anybody my name, I might be stalked,” suggesting it doesn’t occur to workers at Wal-Mart.  If you want to be treated like a professional, you have start acting like one,” he said.

He asked how many attendees offered pictures of the staff on their library web sites? Few raised their hands. “Since when is the value in libraries in the books, not in the people?” he asked. “I want to see our whole profession where everybody’s Nancy Pearl on steroids.”

If you work in a library, you know how controversial what he said is. I note that Abram is male, which in this context is critical. Nor does he work with the public. I wonder whether more than a minority of female librarians would support what he says above.

I have witnessed several fellow librarians harassed by “weird guys” who are regular (um, too regular, if you know what I mean) library users, and spoken to many more who have suffered earlier in their careers from a little too much attention. Public libraries - particularly their adult services departments - are filled with  customers who haven’t been taking their meds.

On the other hand, I totally agree with Abram - we do need to have our names out there in front of the public (and yes, on the library Web site, too), and be proud of who we are and what we do. We do need to be more professionally assertive. I’ve always worn my full name on my badge proudly. But then, I’m male and I’ve never been harassed.

The fact remains that we’ll be most successful if we step away from anonymity. “We need to think bigger,” several of the speakers agreed, and I think so, too. Librarians - especially those who aren’t children’s or YA librarians - tend not to want to make too much noise or attract too much attention to themselves, but we need to change that. Children’s and YA librarians need to repeat the words, “We make literacy fun!” over and over. “Can’t find the information you want? We can!” is good, too.

We need to show everyone in every city and suburb and small town what we can do to make kids want to connect themselves with literacy in all its forms, but especially with the printed word - whether that printed word is online or on a page. We need to say it and show it a thousand different ways. That’s the best kind of future for all of us in youth work.

I’m back from ALA, and I have to go back to work today. But before I do I wanted to post a few more quotes from the ALA conference. And I also wanted to give a cheer for our book cart drill team - the Austin Public Library Bibliofiles - which won the silver at the Book Cart Drill Team Championships on Sunday. (That’s them on the left.) They won a Demco book cart (yeah, that’s it in the picture) that was painted silver, with a little plaque on one end.

The Championship was MC’d by the comedy duo of John Scieszka and Mo Willems, who hammed it up shamelessly and had us all chanting “DEM-co!” (Demco sponsors the Championship) throughout. It was great to watch our homies place as we cheered them on. (Those book headdresses spin, by the way.)

I saw that Alan Sitomer, Los Angeles media specialist and YA author, was giving a program on encouraging boys to read, so of course I was there. He works in an inner-city high school with kids that are almost entirely Latino and Black, and they’re kids who many adults consider not worth spending much time or effort on. These kids are often mouthy or unmotivated. But Sitomer, who could be one of the dictionary definitions of the word “enthusiastic” (he was named California Teacher of the Year, and you can tell he really enjoys public speaking), told us, “You have to believe that kids are reachable. If you don’t, nothing will reach them.”

He uses computer time, Web resources, and any technology he can to get the young men he works with to read. But he also uses something as simple as handing out jokes, printed on paper. He said that when the more motivated students start laughing, the less motivated will read them, too. (Warning - the following jokes are boy jokes):

Q. Why do gorillas have big nostrils?

A. Because they have big fingers.

Q. What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?

A. Anyone can roast beef.

Q. What do you call a hunk of cheddar that doesn’t belong to you?

A. Nacho cheese.

Sitomer says that for this group, many of whom are one bad grade or boring class from dropping out, he doesn’t try to tell them what they must do. “I let them tell me what they like,” he says, “and then I build bridges for them from their outside interests to what’s in the media center.”

I also went to hear T. Berry Brazelton, the Grand Poo-Bah of Pediatricians, who spoke Monday morning. He sat thoughout his talk, and seemed a little hard of hearing - but that wasn’t unexpected after he told us that he had just turned 90. (He said that members of Congress held a celebration for him in Washington, and “they asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I asked for $2 billion for children and their parents.” Ah, we wish.)

Brazelton said that the most important role for the public library should be to help parents understand child development. Anything librarians can supply and market to parents - books, videos, and programs - that will help them comprehend the ages and stages their children are passing through will help them feel more in control of what can be a stressful and confusing process.

He showed us a wonderful film clip of a 12-month-old boy who was passing through a phase Brazelton called “storage.” Brazelton kept handing the boy small toy figures, and after he filled his hands with them, he took them into his mouth, and then looked at his mother as if to say, “Aren’t I so great?” It was a lot of fun.

If you’ve never been to an ALA conference, go when you can. It’s a wonderful way to expand your “box.” (You know, the one they’re always telling you to think out of.)

It’s hard to find much time to blog while you’re running around ALA Annual, but I did want to post a couple of things I heard in sessions. Last night I went to the Odyssey Awards program that Booklist puts on to honor youth audiobooks. The winner was Live Oak Media’s version of Walter Dean Myers’ Jazz. Children’s author and audiobook producer Bruce Coville was pretty funny giving us a mini-history of kids’ audiobooks.

He told us how American educators have long been of two minds about audiobooks, because Americans expect kids to be working hard to get their literature, and listening to an audiobook seems kind of, well, cheating, especially now in the era of No Child Left Behind: “Teachers and librarians ask, ‘Is that child suffering enough? Working hard enough?’ Teachers are being told not to read aloud so much these days.” Coville, on the other hand, wants families to listen to books read aloud, and it sets his teeth on edge when kids are constantly watching DVDs in the back seat: “Every time I see a family going down the road with a damned DVD player in the car,” he said, “I know it’s wrong.”

Instead, Coville pushes hard for us to listen together: “Every great teacher knows the story is the most important thing. We’re a vast and diverse culture in the US, in danger of flying apart at the seams. Stories help us understand each other, and audiobooks are a way to get more stories in our lives.”

He also joked about his experiences driving across the country with his then-14-year-old daughter, saying “when you’re driving through Kansas, I learned that Pride and Prejudice is riveting.”

Today I attended several sessions, but the one that sticks in my mind the most is the one about Maricopa County (AZ) Library’s Dewey-less branch library. Instead of “973.2,” the label on a book’s spine says simply “History.” During the questions, one librarian sounded a little hot under the collar when he asked why the library couldn’t simply put the Dewey labels on the books and put them into a section marked “history,” but the librarians from Maricopa County replied that their users didn’t know Dewey and didn’t understand Dewey.

The feeling I got was that in the era of Google, Dewey wasn’t necessary any more. If people came to the library and were looking for a subject for an assignment, they’d find it more easily in a face-out display of newer, shinier, subject-related books. They say it works for them. The name of the session, by the way, was “Dewey or Don’t We?”