The No Child Left Behind Act was introduced by the Bush Administration back in 2001 and went into effect in 2002. The stated intention was to hold schools and teachers accountable by developing a standardized test for each state to ensure that students were learning what was necessary before graduation from high school. Schools whose students did not meet the approved standards with their test scores would be subject to “federally mandated interventions”¹, which usually take the form of budget cuts. Many teachers said, prior to the law passing, that this would cause a lot of formulaic teaching in the classroom and an extreme emphasis on math and reading. Unfortunately, in the years since 2002, they were proved to be correct.

In Steven Bell’s Library Journal article entitled No Child Left Behind Comes to Campus he highlights that the students entering universities now are largely the result of the formulaic teaching that resulted from No Child Left Behind.² The freshman that entered college this year would have been in 2nd or 3rd grade when the law went into effect, meaning that if they were within the public school system, the vast majority of their education has been dictated by the questions in their state’s standardized test. This is all besides the larger issue that the tests, and therefore student results, are different across each state. How is an admissions officer in any state supposed to compare a Michigan student’s scores against a California student’s?

The test has had an affect on public school libraries as well. Not only do the budget cuts for low-performance schools automatically mean cuts in the library’s spending budget, it also means that librarians could be sacrificed in order to keep a classroom teacher that can teach to the test. And though the test emphasizes reading, it doesn’t encourage library use or information literacy. University librarians are actually being forewarned that the students they will be receiving soon will have very little knowledge of how to write a proper research paper, let alone how to find their way around the stacks and resources the library has.²

Though there are no blatant indications of censorship or threats to access to information, it’s surprising that librarians, even non-academic, have not had a larger reaction to this law from the start. As André Cossette highlights in his essay Humanism and Libraries: an Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship, one of the major roles of librarians is as an educator.³ The No Child Left Behind Act is both inhibiting students from learning analytical thinking, but also discouraging the discovery of new and varying information. Information that could be found in their library. Steven Joyce would agree that librarians should be a loud voice in this conversation because they not only have opinions on information access, intellectual freedom and literacy, but also exist in the social and political realm and cannot be separated from it.⁴

Though many librarians outside of the school system, may think that the No Child Left Behind Act doesn’t affect them, or that it isn’t their place to stick their noses—whether out of a belief of the necessity of remaining a neutral librarian or general apathy—they might soon be seeing the effects in their own libraries. If younger generations aren’t being taught the importance of libraries and the information they can provide, they are very unlikely to use them as they get older. As Wedgeworth put it, “If librarians decide that the issues vital to society are irrelevant to librarians as librarians, then society may find that librarians are irrelevant to it.”⁵ Luckily, university-level librarians may be able to undo some of the damage that has been done in middle and high school, since they don’t have to answer to a standardized test (yet), but not only does this put a lot of pressure on those librarians to educate a massive group of students, but it also misses those students that don’t continue on to higher education.

The No Child Left Behind Act now appears to be failing all over the country. Texas, the state that the principles of the Act were based on, has just been granted a waiver allowing more wiggle room on how to measure the student’s achievements “in exchange for a state plan to prepare students for college and career, focus aid on the neediest students, and support effective teaching and leadership.”¹ But, wait, wasn’t that supposed to be what the No Child Left Behind Act encouraged? Texas isn’t the only state that has requested a waiver, forty-one states and Washington DC  have as well.¹ So, it appears that the Act isn’t working. As the standards have increased over the years, more and more schools have failed to reach the standards and have had their funding cut as a result. At this point, not only are the students failing, the schools are as well.

The law has been up for renewal since 2007, but congress hasn’t addressed it at all, which is why the Obama Administration is issuing so many waivers.¹ It seems that now would be a good time for librarians to  to take a stand against this, because, as Robert Jensen would say, not speaking up is the same as supporting the oppressor.⁶

^{1. Associated Press. (2013, September 30). Feds Grant Texas No Child Left Behind Waiver. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/09/30/us/politics/ap-us-education-waiver-texas.html?ref=nochildleftbehindact&_r=0 ↩}

^{2. Bell, S. (2013, March 20). No Child Left Behind Comes to Campus. The Library Journal. Retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/03/opinion/steven-bell/no-child-left-behind-comes-to-campus-from-the-bell-tower/ ↩}

^{3. Cossette, A. (2009). Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship. (Litwin, R., Trans.). Deluth, MN: Library Juice Press. (Original work published 1976)↩}

^{4. Joyce, S. (1998). A Few Gates Redux: An Examination of the Social Responsibilities Debate in the Early 1970s and 1990s. In Lewis, Alison (Ed.), Questioning Library Neutrality (pp. 33-65). Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press, 35. ↩}

^{5. Ibid., 43↩}

^{6. Jensen, R. (2004). The Myth of the Neutral Professional. In Lewis, Alison (Ed.), Questioning Library Neutrality (pp. 89-96). Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press, 91.↩}

 

“At some point, I suppose, all of us in our lives confront some unavoidable, outsized horror. Maybe it’s a tumor, or a little brother playing with a gun, or a psychopath in a day care center, but inevitably, a moment comes for all of us when we realize that we cannot beat the devil on this one.”

           The line, taken from Susan Jane Gilman’s essay Picnic in Treblinka, is one of those pristine nuggets of indelible truth; a passage so perfectly put that it just seems to scream out to be underlined and read again and again.

            In Picnic Gilman recounts her time as a fresh-faced, piss and vinegar-fueled reporter for The Jewish Week. She’s not very good (she orders lobster bisque during lunch with a prominent rabbi), mostly due to the fact that as a twenty-something who’s been largely sheltered all her life, Gilman is filled with hubris. The Jewish Week is just a bump in the road, the cross she has to bear before The New York Times and Vanity Fair discover her natural talents and snatch her away to print media Camelot.

            Eventually Gilman’s job leads her to a gig chaperoning teenagers on a trip to, of all places, Auschwitz, and that’s when the aforementioned epiphany comes; this idea that eventually the world is going to rear its ugly head and give you a toothy, terrifying smile, as if to say, yes, this really is a horrible place.

            We library science students seem by default to possess a naïve (albeit well-intentioned and possibly altruistic) idea of what our future roles as librarians will be. To put it more simply, we want to make a difference. Cossette might not enjoy seeing librarians as educators, but to some extent that’s exactly what we are: We promote literacy and facilitate the acquirement of knowledge. It is the hope of every librarian that a patron exits his or her library at least a little more well-informed.

            The desire to make a difference is not a bad thing. In fact it’s tremendous. Where, really, would the world be without its do-gooders or the selfless progressives who decided to stick their necks out? But do we as students, like Gilman, suffer from a sense of hubris if only because we believe we can affect lives for the better?  

            So what, as librarians, is our unavoidable, outsized horror?  What is that reality that’s so big and so overwhelming that it shakes us?

              The homeless.

            Now let’s put some quantifiers on this. We’re not talking about the squatter punks, or the Woody Guthrie wannabes riding the rails. We’re not talking about the recession-hit, as-seen-on-Frontline families down on their luck. We’re not even talking about shelter kids. These are acceptable, perhaps even gentrified forms of homelessness. A sort of homelessness that, if you don’t outwardly feel for its victims then you’re at least willing to engage with it. They are the not-quite-disenfranchised.

            No, what we are talking about are the chronically homeless: The drug addicts and alcoholics and above all else mentally ill. The ones who hear voices and talk to themselves. The ones who reek of bodily fluids. The ones who ooze and bleed and pus.

            When the tragedy of the world grins down at you it’ll come in the form of a guy screaming when you tell him to get off the public computer, a woman who insists she talks to angels, or the gentleman relieving himself in nonfiction. 

             The magnitude of this horror and the feeling of helplessness that comes along with it reverberate throughout Chip Ward’s America Gone Wrong: A Slashed Safety Net Turns Libraries into Homeless Shelters. Ward’s anger is palpable. He spends at least half of the article describing in detail the regulars of his establishment. Here Ward’s prose isn’t just flippant, but at points strikes an outrageously condescending tone, as if he were gesturing towards one of his miserable patrons and saying, “Hey, would you get a load of this guy? Whackjob!” Here, for example, is Ward’s description of a patron named John:

            John is trying hard not to be noticed. He has been in trouble lately for the scabs and raw, wet spots that are spreading across his hands and face. Staff members have wondered aloud if he is contagious and asked him to get himself checked-out, but he refuses treatment. He knows he is still being tracked, thanks to the implants the nurse slipped under his skin the last time he surrendered to the clinic and its prescriptions. There are frequencies we don’t hear — but he does. Thin whistles and a subtle beeping indicate he is being followed, his eye movements tracked and recorded. He claims he falls asleep in his chair by the stairway because “the little ones” poke him in the legs with sharp objects that inject sleep-inducing potions.

           Ward, the (recently retired) assistant director of Salt Lake City Public Library, could probably serve as a living, breathing case study in the negative effects of street level bureaucracy. He dehumanizes his involuntary clientele, while casting himself in the hero’s role, seething the entire time at the pure injustice of it all.  He is, as Michael Lipsky would put it, attempting “to alter expectations about job performance.”  

            And yet if you can get past Ward and his heavy-handed language you have to grudgingly admit that he has a point. He’s not just angry at his patrons, he’s angry at the system–or lack thereof–that created them. Ward is in fact suffering—yes, suffering—from a quintessential street level quandary: How to serve a community in need with little to no resources and even less support? And this is not just any community, but a community the rest of us goes out of our way to ignore.

            Ward documents his attempts to try and solve the problem, attending conference after conference about the homeless. When the gathered social workers, counselors and therapists find out his vocation, they inevitably ask him the same question: What are you doing here? To which Ward (I like to imagine at this point he throws a chair) replies, “Where do you think they go during the day?”

            When I originally conceived of this post I’d planned to do a number of things. I was going to talk about a rash of libraries passing policies set out to essentially ban the homeless; policies that forbid such things as bathing, shaving and washing hair in public bathrooms; policies that prohibit sleeping bags or deny entry to anyone with “offensive body odor.” I was going to talk about how the problem with such policies is not just that they’re discriminatory, but go against all the ethereal ideals of what we do, what we want to do, and how we are as librarians, namely the ideal that libraries are there to serve the people i.e. everyone. And then I was going to offer up solutions, like hiring social workers and peer counselors in addition to regular staff. I was going to suggest that libraries form partnerships with various non-profits to conduct surveys and put on workshops; that they take the ALA-recommended avenue and promote and purchase materials that respectfully and honestly address homelessness issues.

            I actually did write all that, and then I sent it off to a fellow librarian for feedback. Her response was to ask whether or not I was being sarcastic. As my friend saw it, the policies profiling the homeless that I’d found so horrific weren’t just justified but necessary.

            “Are libraries supposed to be shelters to the homeless that extend its facilities to bathing and changing of clothes? And frankly, have you ever been close to a person who has not bathed in months? Anna, that odor cleared entire subway cars,” she wrote. “Where does serving the homeless end and driving out the other patrons begin?  When I worked in Brooklyn, some homeless guy [expletive] all over the bathroom floor!  No one could use it after that.”

            Spoken like a true burned-out, alienated street-level bureaucrat.

            One of my original problems with Lipsky’s 1969 Toward a Theory of Street-Level Bureaucracy had been that it’s an analysis. His objective is to create a theory about street-level bureaucracy, not offer up solutions to its ill effects. After page after page of telling us everything that’s wrong he doesn’t give us anything with which to cure it, but perhaps that’s the point and the first admission we have to make before we can call ourselves librarians: There is no cure-all.     

            Perhaps once we get past the idea of saving the world, we can just do our best to try and change it.

           

In today’s technology-driven society, wherein users are a click away from accessing any and all kinds of information, libraries are plagued with maintaining a position of relevancy in the community lest they succumb to obsolescence. In the words of Andre Cossette, author of “Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship,” “Librarians find themselves in a technological world amidst a technological revolution, to which they are having trouble adapting” (23). This pressure to keep up with technology is compounded by a constant lack of funds. How might libraries assert their public presence and technological authority when faced with budgetary setbacks? Librarians in Colorado and Kansas are coming up with creative solutions to these very issues.

An article published in Library Journal’s July issue presented an interesting example. This past June, Colorado’s Aurora Public Library set up shop inside a local Kmart. The 600-square foot room accommodates 11 computers for the public’s use, making it more of an information or computer center than a traditional library. Despite the center’s lack of books, users are able to access the internet for educational or recreational purposes. Library members have unlimited use of the computers, while those without library cards are restricted to one hour. Luckily, since library cards are free, this should encourage non-traditional library users to start a membership. Patrons can connect to the library’s online catalog if they wish to place a hold on books, and they can even request drop-off or pick-up of books in the store.

There are many benefits to this unconventional solution. To start, the library “runs at a fraction of the cost of a conventional branch,” allowing Aurora’s public librarians the opportunity to save the money they would have spent on materials and upkeep in a bigger library. Additionally, by placing the computer center at the front of Kmart, the library will likely benefit from a greater exposure than a traditional library building could hope to receive. Customers looking to shop at Kmart may find themselves using the computers and signing up for a library card simply because of the library’s convenient location. Finally, and perhaps best of all, by opening this satellite branch, Aurora Public Library is strengthening its relationship with the community by meeting the needs of its citizens. According to the article, “one third of individuals living in northern Aurora–where many immigrant and low-income families live and the Kmart is located–do not own personal computers.” Cossette writes that “in providing needed information [and access to that information] to all citizens, especially the most disadvantaged, the library lends its support to the realization of democratic ideals” (56). In one fell swoop, Aurora Public Library managed to maintain its relevancy within the community and provide internet access for those who need it in a cost-effective way.

Elsewhere in the country, libraries have approached these aforementioned challenges in a different, though similarly unconventional, manner. Another article in the July issue of Library Journal explained how Kansas State Library recently partnered with its local airport, Manhattan Regional, to provide passengers with reading material while they wait to board. The program, called Books on the Fly, encourages people with mobile devices such as cell phones and e-readers to scan QR codes placed on cards throughout the airport. Users are taken to the library’s website, where library members can then download, for free, any of the library’s e-books. Nonmembers are redirected to Project Gutenberg, a digital library that contains thousands of e-books ready to be downloaded to any computer or mobile device.

According to Candace LeDuc, communications coordinator of Kansas’ state library, “the only cost to the library is the printed materials. Once your material is in the airport, there’s no overhead.” Because there are no computers or physical books to maintain, this is a simple, inexpensive way to promote a library without breaking the budget.

As was the case in Colorado, by establishing a base in a highly-populated, if unorthodox, location, Kansas State Library managed to find a way to reach out to the public, especially those who may not be the traditional library patron. According to the article,“With its emphasis on QR codes as a point of entry, the program is designed to appeal to irregular readers with time on their hands.” Once again, librarians were able to find a cost-effective way to secure their library’s place in a technology-centered society.

When libraries are faced with unrelenting budget cuts, the challenges of staying atop the current technological trends and maintaining a strong relationship with the community seem overwhelming. Author and librarian Sandy Iverson worried that “while technology has increased access to information, at the same time we are experiencing funding cutbacks to the public library system…In order to continue service, libraries are beginning to charge user fees for certain services. This practice contradicts the tenets of equal access to information, and may eventually result in the extinction of the public library system.” But as the librarians in Colorado and Kansas proved, it does not have to come to that. It takes some creative thinking, but it is possible to work with a reduced budget to incorporate technology at no cost to users, all the while establishing a strong public role. As these two cases show, libraries are far from becoming extinct.

Links to articles:

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/07/library-services/colorado-library-opens-outpost-inside-kmart/

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/07/marketing/libraries-partner-with-local-airports/

 

In the world, no library has the influence and the prestige of library of congress. In 1800, when government was moved from New York to the new capital city of Washington DC, the Congress established its Library. According to its mission, the Library is “to acquire, organize, preserve, secure, and sustain for the present and future of the Congress and the nation a comprehensive record of American history and creativity and a universal collection of human knowledge.”This mission holds true today, even as they broaden the ways in which the library fulfills it. More recently, the mission of it has been articulated as follows: “To support the congress in fulfilling tis constitutional duties and to further the progress of knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the American people.” [1. Strategic Plan of the Library of Congress: 2011-2016]

As is a library belongs to the Congress, no doubt, the library’s single most responsibility is to provide the authoritative research, analysis and information to the Congress to help the US Congress to fulfill their duties. The Law library of Congress is a good example. The Congress will get the comprehensive research on international or U.S law and other legal reference services from the Law library of congress. This mission of the library of congress continues to hold today and will always exist first and foremost.

As the biggest collection in the world, the library of congress owned over 145 million physical items including books, movies, audios, maps, and photos. (Library of Congress website) One of them has a significant historic importance that is its collection of around sixty five million manuscript. This collection holds some of the most treasured documents at the library from the presidential paper to original draft of poems. In the world of print materials, the library of congress is famous for being the world’s largest library. Now, the library is on the way to hosting the largest digital collection in the world with more than 700 terabytes of data. The library of congress has been leader in digitizing primary sources. Because of the copyright issues only of two hundred of those can put online for worldwide education, learning and research. The online primary source files number more than 19 million and have greatly expanded access to unique and historically important items and full collection. [2. VOA news 2009-10-09, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylFlAQZ0piU] The library of congress opened their Audio Visual conservation in July 2007 and started to use Flickr to archive their photo documents since 2008. From 2010, they use twitter to save all their public communication. Recently years, they also established environmental monitoring program and tried to build a new storage facilities at Maryland. All those efforts are trying to preserve more physical and digital materials so that the future generation may use, learn from and be inspired by those information. Acquiring, preserving and providing access to a universal collection of knowledge and the record of America’s creativity is the greatest responsibility of the library of congress which is also a huge tough and never ending work. [3. A digital strategy for the library of congress (2000), page 146-149]

In the nineteenth century, the United States Constitution (Article1, Section 8) empowers Congress to

Promote the progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors…the exclusive Right to their… Writings…

The Copyright Act achieves this goal to protect the authors’ right. The congress placed the library the function of sustain an effective nation copyright system. The library of congress is not isolated, it also need and have the duty to lead and work collaboratively with external communities to advance knowledge and creativity. That seems included all the missions and roles of the library of congress.

Since talking about so many roles, missions, and responsibilities of the library of congress. As the largest library in the world, the library is definitely not neutral, it present of the Congress. In this strike of federal government, the library of congress totally shut down. Also, the library of congress has so many treasured documents such as Shakespeare’s original first draft, the hand-copy of Beethoven’s sketch. But in fact, the public may have to chance to see those face to face in their whole life. Surely, only a tiny part of the future generation could be inspired by those preservations. Moreover, in the last decade, the library of congress really did a great job to digitize most of their physical materials including books, pictures, and maps in large size. Due to the copyright system, only two hundred of them can be visit online. So we couldn’t stop thinking who are their patrons after so many hardship. If citizens could not access those information, it feels like hundreds ponds lighter even under such a pressure of an endless, tedious, complexity, omnifarious work.

E-books: everyone has an opinion on them. Some say they will never read a book on a screen, loving the feel and smell of printed books. Others won’t go back to typical books again. I personally own a Kindle and love it. However, most of the books I want to read aren’t available on OverDrive, my public library’s domain for borrowing library e-books for free.

There are several article blurbs on the online Library Journal site which discuss the good, bad and the ugly concerning e-books. One article, “Penguin Drops Side Loading Requirement for Kindle Lending,” by Matt Enis advises that Penguin, the publishing company, has just changed their loaning terms and conditions for downloading e-books using OverDrive.  In the past, patrons have had to download books to their computers first and then transfer them to Kindles, but now they are able to download titles directly onto Kindle using OverDrive.

Another article, “Q&A: Recorded Books VP Matt Walker” by The Digital Shift, advertises a workshop called “The Digital Shift: Reinventing Libraries,” to be held on online on October 16.^th   The program will discuss how libraries have changed in the digital age.

Will libraries go 100% digital in the near future, leaving no need for “real” books, or—gasp—librarians? Some already have. For example, Gollis University in Somalia has a digital library which opened last year, featuring thousands of books in soft format. The first all-digital library in the United States is Bexar County, Texas and is called the “BiblioTech”.

Another article which touches upon these issues is “Stepinac Goes All Digital” by Gary Stern. Archbishop Stepinac High School is a private, Catholic all boys school in White Plains, New York. It is one of the first schools in the country to have all digital text books. Each student buys an iPad and uses it throughout high school, the article explains. The cost of textbooks adds up to about the same amount in the long run, so it is well worth it for families to invest in this piece of equipment. Another benefit of having an iPad for school is the apps which are downloaded onto it, such as an app for grading student essays for grammar, as well as repeating ideas throughout the work. It suggests how the essay can be improved as well.

Having things like digital libraries and iPads will make doing research much easier. Nowadays, we use libraries to search the Web for research projects or for other information more than we read books. When our parents were kids, they relied heavily on encyclopedias and other printed resources to do their homework. In the future, the more abundant all-digital libraries are, the easier it will be to find information. J. McGrath’s paper, “Methodology Matters: Doing Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences,” discusses research methods in depth. In the near future, perhaps these methods will change because of advanced technology.