5/2/13 Reflection on the PLA, YALSA, AASL, and ALSC

Post date: May 2, 2013 3:28:20 PM

"About PLA.” Public Library Association. American Library Association. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2013. <http://www.ala.org/pla/about>.

"About YALSA." Young Adult Library Services Association. American Library Association. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2013. <www.ala.org/yalsa/aboutyalsa>.

"Advocacy Events." American Library Association. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2013. <http://www.ala.org/advocacy/advleg/advocacyinstitute>.

"American Association of School Librarians (AASL)." American Library Association. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2013. <http://www.ala.org/aasl/>.

"Everyday Advocacy ." Association for Library Service to Children. American Library Association, n.d. Web. 1 May 2013. <www.ala.org/everyday-advocacy/>.

I found a very interesting link when searching advocacy within the ALA.org site. There is a wallet-sized handout (linked under Useful Links) called Quotable Facts About America’s Libraries where the site suggests handing them out to those who don’t believe in the importance of libraries. One of the Advocacy events that the ALA promotes is “Snapshot of Your Library” which promotes libraries across the nation to actively show their communities what their libraries can do and to count the number of people who regularly use the library. When there are more results, these will compile to show nationwide statistics of library usage.

YALSA is devoted to helping libraries become more accommodating to teens and provides professional development for librarians to become effective advocates to teens in their libraries. This is really beneficial because teens were overlooked for a long time in libraries. There was literature for children and for adults, and teens had to bounce between the two, picking and choosing among the options. Now there are many more efforts towards bringing teens back into libraries and promoting reading for the 12-18 age group.

The PLA, Public Library Association, has great tools that would be essential to helping patrons of a public library. They have a large group of members and their website shows a real push towards integrating the web and the public library for the changing community as it turns more and more towards the internet for information. They have online courses, webinars, etc. I like that they are showing a serious effort to change with the times, showing that public libraries will not become obsolete in the future as some think they will.

I like how the ALSC has almost 60 committees that promote advocacy because advocacy really is what alerts most of America to the things that their library can do for them. In “Quotable Facts About America’s Libraries” I found out that parents spend 18 times as much on video games as on their public libraries. This number is ridiculously high considering Americans visit school, public, and academic libraries three times more than they go to the movies, or that Americans on average check out about eight books per year, but only donate enough to cover about the cost of one hard cover book to their local library. The ALSC has a program called Everyday Advocacy that could help this number by drawing attention to all of the things that a library can do for the children in their community. Their website appears very open and they also have links for how to deal with complaints or skepticism.

The American Association of School Librarians have under their Advocacy link on their website events such as Banned Websites Awareness Day and School Library Month. I had never heard of Banned Websites Awareness Day before and I really appreciate the idea behind it. Schools block access to many websites that they feel are inappropriate for children, but among those that are inappropriate to view during the school day are those that actually help students to learn and build skills. The AASL designated the Wednesday during Banned Books Week to be Banned Websites Awareness Day, which will fall on September 25 this year. This would be a good thing to also promote to academic libraries, especially those with Children’s’ Literature collections so that more students going into the teaching field would be aware and they could plan events in their future classrooms to draw attention to the event at their own schools.

Overall, I believe that these segments of the ALA have very good advocacy programs, although YALSA’s are not as well laid out on their website. YALSA intermingles their advocacy programs with the rest of their website, whereas the others choose to put most of their advocacy plans under one tab. This is both a good and a bad thing because having them spread out may draw the eye to individual programs more, but those looking specifically for ways to advocate will need to spend more time if they wish to choose between all of the programs.