Marilyn L. Miller receives ALSC Distinguished Service Award
Contact: Laura Schulte-Cooper
312-280-2165
lschulte@ala.org
For Immediate Release
March 24, 2005
Marilyn L. Miller receives ALSC Distinguished Service Award
CHICAGO - The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), is proud to announce that Marilyn L. Miller, past president of ALA, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), and ALSC, is the 2005 recipient of the ALSC Distinguished Service Award.
The award honors an individual ALSC member who has made significant contributions to, and an impact on, library service to children and to ALSC, as well as a sustained contribution over time to the understanding or expansion of library services to children.
Miller has been actively working in the field of library service to children since the 1950s, and she has been active in the American Library Association since the 1960s. She has served on the ALA Standing Committee on Library Education; the ALA-Association for American Publishers Joint Committee, and the ALA Awards Committee. Miller was president of the Association for Library Service to Children from 1979-80.
Highlights of her professional career include serving as school library consultant for the Kansas Department of Public Instruction, as an educator in library science at Western Michigan University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as professor and chair of the Department of Library and Information Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro until her retirement in 1995.
Throughout her academic career, Miller has personally and directly influenced the development of her students, and, indirectly influenced the lives of the children they would ultimately serve. This influence carried over into her work with ALA, AASL, and ALSC, and with the National Council on Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), where she was instrumental in keeping libraries on the agenda.
Miller has written extensively about library service to young people. Her statistical research on expenditures for school library media programs, in collaboration with Marilyn Shontz and published by
School Library Journal 1983-2003, has had a recognizable impact on the field. Her latest publication, “Pioneers and Leaders in Library Services to Youth” (Libraries Unlimited, 2003), is “Dedicated to the memory of those who developed the models for creative and dynamic library service for the nation's youth.”
Members of the 2005 Distinguished Service Award Committee are: Chair, Therese Bigelow, Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library; Dorothy Evans, Chicago Public Library; Anna Healy, Chicago; Margaret Mary Kimmel, University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences; and Michelle Waddy, Oakland (Calif.) Public Library.
