Program Learning Outcome 5

In a world where budget cuts often start with librarians, it is now simply expected that school librarians are going to have to advocate for our positions and programs (Burns, 2015). The reality is that there is a great deal of misinformation when it comes to libraries, both school and public. The stereotypical old white woman with a bun and glasses shushing people is nothing like the librarians of today. Just take a look at this graduating class and that is obvious. What I didn't realize when I started this program was the sheer amount of advocacy that we were going to have to do. However, I also have a new appreciation of what counts as advocacy.

Librarians as advocators has a variety of meanings. In the school media track we focus a great deal about the need for advocacy in order to protect our jobs and to promote the library and its services. But in the broader sense, we are the ones who also advocate for access, intellectual freedom, copyright, and first amendment issues. In a world where it often feels that "the one with the most toys wins," librarians are there to help level the playing field.

We talk a lot about the need to educate the public about libraries and all that we offer communities. In LIS 650 I focused my management research paper on library advocacy and marketing. McClure, Feldman, and Ryan (2006) suggest the very essence of library advocacy is to get the word out about services and overall community value. At the same time that I was writing that paper I was actively involved in advocating for my local library. We were trying to convince people in the community of the many values of a physical library and all that it can offer to a community. Our main opponents argued that physical libraries were no longer needed since everyone has e-readers. I'm happy to say that our advocacy worked out in the long run. School librarians face the same issues. In LIS 653 my advocacy plan focused simply on communication and three distinct ways that we could improve stakeholders' understanding of all that we do.

On the other side of advocacy is advocating for access to information. At the very heart of the American library is a desire for knowledge and education. We are given the task to protect free access to information, but in the same heartbeat, part of that role is to educate people about the very things that stand in the way of their access. When we teach about banned books, we are quietly advocating. Every student should understand the First Amendment and Intellectual Freedom. Helping students navigate the overwhelming amount of information available on the internet also plays into this as we all need to be able to understand bias and outright lies that people try to pass off as truth.

An area that I have long advocated for was making sure that there are diverse titles in a library. Being in a small, semi-rural, Southern town, there is a lot of pushback when people see certain books in the library, especially in a school library. That's an even bigger statement of why we have to advocate for those diverse books. In my CAMP project, I highlighted the lack of diverse graphic novels in the library I was working in and advocated for additional funding.