Editorial: Passionate About Reading
Nancy Pearl joins the short list of LJ's great librarians Jan 15, 2011LJ ’S first librarian of the year, in 1989, felt as if she’d been demoted when she was transferred from the main library in Garland, TX, to the Walnut Creek Branch as an adult services librarian. A decade earlier, she’d been head of that branch when it opened.
The community to which Peggy Goodwin returned had a multiethnic population, including Hispanic, Vietnamese, Korean, and other non-English-speakers, most of whom didn’t use the library and in fact were suspicious of any government agency.
Undeterred by the challenge and her personal exile, she took to the streets, visiting businesses and churches, talking to people to see what they needed. She spent hours at home writing grants to establish ESL classes in the library and to purchase foreign-language materials, books for beginning English readers, and audio equipment. She enlisted volunteers to provide day care for children while their parents learned English and partnered with other organizations to set up citizenship classes and career days. Her efforts overcame the reluctance of many of the new immigrants to use the library. They also promoted reading and English-language literacy among a new group of library users in her community.
What drove her? “She has that professional dedication that marks the great in our field,” John Berry wrote in LJ in January 1989 (p. 39). “She has that desire, no that need, to serve that is the true librarian’s credo.”
Passion to serve, to effect social change, marked the second librarian of the year, too. Brenda Vogel was library coordinator of the Maryland Correctional Education Libraries, serving the state’s prison population. An advocate for freedom of information for the incarcerated, she bucked the correctional community in her state and nationally to change attitudes and policy and to provide what she described as “real lifelike library service to prisoners in Maryland” (LJ 1/90, p. 47), a group she felt were being deprived of their rights. Ironically, when her story was picked up by USA Today, what caught the paper’s attention was that the inmates liked “steamy novels”—or as Vogel put it, the same kind of popular reading that those outside prison walls like.
Several years later, when LJ talked with Goodwin and Vogel, we found that the award had not only drawn national attention to their “passions” from media like USA Today. It also had garnered additional grants and sustained funding and growth for Goodwin’s ESL classes and Vogel’s prison library services. (Sadly, Vogel died on November 29, 2010.)
Twenty-two librarians of the year, 22 stellar careers, 21 individuals and one group (Team Cedar Rapids, IA, 2009) with a passion to serve and bring about change. Like Goodwin and Vogel, our winners have all been politically astute, able to enlist support from the local community, as Goodwin did, and then to turn the award into further political and other capital.
Among the 22 librarians of the year, the overwhelming majority have been directors of public libraries in city or county systems. (For the full list, go to bit.ly/gcMUWB.) And though many of our winners have been acknowledged for their contributions to literacy and “the encouragement of reading” (one of the award’s criteria) like Goodwin and Vogel, we’ve never had a librarian of the year whose major claim to the award was a “passionate advocacy” for books and reading.
Now, we do. As Berry writes in this issue (p. 24–26), “No one other than Nancy Pearl has so convinced Americans that libraries, books, and reading are critical to our communities.” She has not only “promoted libraries well beyond library walls” and transformed the public’s perception of librarians, as Berry notes, but she has revitalized readers’ advisory as a crucial component of library work itself. In doing so, she has created a compelling role for librarians as we move into the ebook world.
| Author Information |
| Francine Fialkoff (ffialkoff@mediasourceinc.com) is Editor-in-Chief, LJ |
