Bulletin of the Office for Diversity American Library Association ISSN 1554-494X

MAY - JUNE 2005
SPECIAL ANNUAL 2005 ISSUE

EDITORIAL

Toward a Curriculum of Readiness
Tracie D. Hall

I sit down to write this at the end of a week that has seemed to stretch out forever. Meetings, phone calls, budgets, contacts, programs, plans—my to-do list takes on impossible proportions. Layered with papers, my entire desk has become an in-box. As the red dot on my telephone glares warning me of messages waiting to be attended to, writing this editorial, the sheer act of thinking, composing, and recording thoughts seems a hedonistic luxury.

Having completed my second year in the Office for Diversity I still feel myself a sophomore. The protocol, the politics, the politics behind the politics, has provided a formidable learning curve. The amount of process involved in moving an idea from concept to action is often sobering for a self-described “doer” like me. Sometimes my impatience rails up like a mustang at odds with its saddle. Other times I make peace with knowing that patience, if partnered with persistence, is truly the gatekeeper to deep and systemic change.

Indeed it was the desire for systemic change that challenged me to look for ways to better serve not only the community that used my library, but to improve library services to similar communities across the nation. Work with homeless youth in my early twenties had led me, perhaps providentially, to work with youth in libraries and then back to school for the degree. Less than five years out of library school, I found myself heading a branch of an urban public library in a neighborhood that sometimes made my own upbringing in Watts seem utopic. Alongside my resourceful staff, I faced every kind of harsh social reality: the cyclical poverty that placed the community in a chokehold; young girls who seemed to go from double-dutch to motherhood overnight; the drug trade as the most viable employer of young men; cruel and senseless violence; and a resignation and indifference that becomes compounded as the light at the end of the tunnel becomes increasingly faint.

I remember once when one of my favorite library patrons walked in pushing the battered stroller that carried her third child. All three children were under five, bright and burningly beautiful. I bent down to receive the customary embraces of the two eldest.  Their mother, observing me playfully trying to free myself from the grip of her son, met my eyes and earnestly asked, “Do you want him? I can’t afford to feed them all”. I smiled and might even have laughed nervously, trying to make light of her question. But we both knew that she had meant it. In the span of a few years in that library, I would come to know the interiors of so many lives—who was struggling with heroin; who was living with domestic abuse; who was hiding illiteracy; who was undocumented and coping with exploitative work conditions to make ends meet; who was close to giving up…

This was not the information environment that library school had prepared me for. This was real life. I don’t think that any library class could have prepared me for the shooting death of one of the most avid teen readers I have ever met. He could and should have been a YALSA poster-kid, if it hadn’t been for coming of age in a neighborhood where for many living past twenty-five is a major accomplishment. And even my “Services to Special Populations” course could not have readied me for an environment where pertinent library services only peripherally involved conventional library resources or technologies. To serve my users I had to be willing to break some rules and take some risks in order to meet people where they were. Relevant library service meant helping users decipher home and tax liens; using the staff lunchroom to hold private consultations between immigrant services advocates and library users anxious about residency and naturalization issues.

When I think about my library education and the complex experiences I have faced as a librarian and as a library manager, I can’t help but feel that some of the emphasis placed on database construction (which I loved, by the way) and conventional reference would have been enriched by equal attention paid to community development and psychology; social justice; interrogations of race, class, gender, and sexuality; adult education; ESL education; an introduction to social work; business management and some basic principles of accounting--all concepts that are essential to readiness for library service.

Collection Development and Readers Advisory (I had the good fortune of being proselytized by Nancy Pearl herself!) are two of my greatest professional passions, but I would have failed my community in northeast Hartford and the profession itself if I had let my work as a librarian end there. In an interview herein recruitment champion Greg Reese calls on library schools and practitioners to come together to make library education more relevant to the needs of the country’s culturally and socially dynamic population. I echo this. I am an admitted bibliophile, passionate about research and information aggregation, and a friend to any technology that expedites these processes but I became a librarian so that I could work with library users. As the indefatigable Reinette Jones says elsewhere in these pages, “I don’t get a high from computers; I get a high from the people.”

Here’s to library education (both formal and self-learning) that puts people, in all their incarnations and with their myriad information needs, first!

Tracie D. Hall is Director, ALA Office for Diversity.

 ©The American Library Association, 2005.  All material in Versed subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be photocopied for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement. 

Versed, the official publication of the American Library Association’s Office for Diversity, is published 5 times per year online with paper printings available twice yearly at ALA midwinter meetings and annual conferences.

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