using the Internet for various purposes, and advise day care providers on dig- ital resources. To do this effectively, they themselves will need continual edu- cation and retraining.
A final deficit of the Information Age model for a children’s library is that it offers little to the babies and toddlers who are such enthusiastic participants in traditional book and story-oriented events. These tiny patrons seem to benefit more from our story times and board books than from our computers.
Some early childhood specialists admit that computers play a limited role in a well-rounded preschool program for children who are at least three years of age, but none is willing to claim that they have any benefits for babies and toddlers. The visionary pied piper of children’s computing, Seymour Papert, cautions against using computers as “baby stimulators” or “baby-sitters,” or using them to force learning at an artificially early age. He speculates that an infant’s computer might take a very different form from the machines that currently sit on our desks. It might look like the stuffed objects that babies play with now. He writes, “The baby will use it by hitting it, touching it, gur- gling or yelling at it, watching what it does and hearing the sounds it makes”
(1996, 98). Now that I think about it, that’s what my toddler grandchild does with her Teletubbie toy that has a microcomputer chip inside. It is primitive, but it is a computer, and she interacts with it just as Papert predicted.
The tragic schoolyard shootings of 1998 and 1999 forced many com- munities to look more closely at the environment in which their children are growing up. A parent in Littleton, Colorado, the affluent, suburban commu- nity that was the site of the shootings at Columbine High School, says,
“We’ve become a garage-door society. We come into our homes with a click of a button. We close the door and our porches are in our backyards” (Cart 1999, A8). The wealthy southern California community of San Marino has zoning regulations that prevent children from playing in the front yard.
There are surely still places in this country where grown-ups sit on their porches or stoops and look after the children who play in their front yards and on the sidewalks. There must be communities where nosy neighbors can still be counted on to interfere when children misbehave or find themselves in trouble. General Colin Powell, who is the spokesperson for a national ini- tiative to improve the lives of young people through volunteer efforts, talks about the informal network of “aunts” who supervised the block on which he was raised, watching out for the kids as they walked to school. He encourages communities to re-create these “aunt-nets” and to develop sanctuaries—safe places for kids to go after school (1998). Libraries could be those sanctuaries.
When Colin Powell reminisces about the neighborhood of his childhood, it is easy to dismiss his talk as nostalgia. It is not so easy to dismiss the reports of children themselves who talk about what’s missing from their com- munities. A 1988 survey conducted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching found that only 59 percent of the fifth-graders and 45 percent of the eighth-graders reported that there were good places to play in their neighborhoods (Boyer 1991, 93). There is no reason to believe that anything has improved since then.
One recent study reported that the hours between 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., when many young adolescent and older children are neither in school nor under the supervision of their parents, account for more than 50 percent of all juvenile crimes. By the time they are twelve years old, nearly 35 per- cent of American kids are regularly left on their own (Alter 1998). We know that some of them show up as the ubiquitous, restless latchkey kids who present our public libraries with great challenges and opportunities. Other self-care children are home alone.
There are places where families can find rich offerings of after-school activities—music and dance lessons, youth organizations such as Girl Scouts and 4H. Many parents seek out additional educational opportunities for their
children, from Hebrew lessons to tutoring in math. There is still a shortfall, however, between what is available and affordable and what families need.
Good communities for children would offer them rich, stimulating, safe environments in which they could explore the world outside their homes and families. There would be places to play and places to develop as unique indi- viduals—arts and crafts centers, athletic facilities, parks, playgrounds, muse- ums, and public libraries. There would be public spaces where children could have meaningful interactions with people from all generations. There would be opportunities to observe people at work and to participate in the life of the community, perhaps by serving on community youth councils, planning civic events, or volunteering to help other people.
The tradition of library services to children supports putting the child in the community at the center of our mission. The founders of library service to children spoke eloquently about the circumstances in which their young patrons lived. Since many of the earliest libraries to focus on children’s serv- ices were urban, they often talked about crowded tenements and unsafe sweatshops where children labored for pennies. In a speech to the American Library Association in 1905, Frances Jenkins Olcott, head of the children’s department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, talked about the demo- graphics of Pittsburgh, where more than two-thirds of the total population of 321,616 were “either foreign born, or children of foreign born parents, and persons of negro descent” (p. 72). She was knowledgeable about the employ- ment opportunities, the housing conditions, and the curriculum of the public schools. She knew her city inside and out, and she understood what living there was like for children.
Olcott noted that her children’s department was reaching thousands of children through children’s rooms in libraries and through the city schools.
She worried, however, about the large numbers of children who didn’t come into the library and were not enrolled in school. “These children work at home,” she explained, “in toby shops, in factories, or they sell papers. There are also ‘gangs’ of restless boys who hang about street corners and whose lawless mischief leads them into crime” (p. 73). Olcott did not abandon these at-risk children. She organized an operation that cooperated with “institutions for social betterment,” such as social settlements, the juvenile court, and the Newsboys’ Home. The library staff established home libraries, small cases of books, in working-class homes. They would visit the homes, where they would gather a group of children and talk about the books, read aloud, tell
stories, and teach crafts such as sewing or basketry. “The visitor from the library has a strong influence upon the home in which her group meets, as well as among the neighbors,” Olcott explained. “She is often able to aid the families in case of illness, poverty, or lack of work, by putting them in touch with charitable institutions” (p. 74).
The children’s department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh also worked directly with boy gangs. Olcott discovered that these boys loved to read “trashy literature,” even forming clubs that circulated the dime novels among themselves. To introduce the boys to more “improving” literature, she organized reading and game clubs, using clubrooms donated by school boards, mission houses, the Newsboys’ Home, and a Jewish synagogue.
Olcott was a member in good standing of the sisterhood of early librari- ans who believed that the library had no higher purpose than putting fine lit- erature in the hands of children. Yet she clearly understood that the children she was serving in Pittsburgh lived in particular communities, and she adapted her services to the circumstances of those children. I would submit that she designed her library services for the child in the community.
The outreach activities of the 1960s and 1970s again brought children’s librarians out into the communities where their patrons—and potential patrons—lived. I remember telling stories in the playground of the housing project near the branch library where I worked in San Francisco in the late 1960s. It was eye opening to see how many children living just three blocks away had never found their way to the local library. In the early 1970s, I moved to southern California and worked for several years in the Boyle Heights barrio. My coworkers and I were tireless in our efforts to reach out to the Latino families in our neighborhood. We organized mothers clubs and community posadas. We told stories and sold pinatas at the feria de los ninosin the local park. We shopped at the local markets and ate lunch at Manuel’s Burritos, home of the famous Hollenbeck burrito. One of my daugh- ters went to camp with the local girls club, and my father helped the kids make a huge Frankenstein for the library’s summer reading program. It was outreach based on person-to-person contacts as we tried to design library services for the children and families in our community.
That was then. This is now. How would we design library services for the child in the community today? We can’t use a cookie-cutter approach because each community is different, but we can make some broad assumptions about what libraries might do for children in the community in the future.
Librarians designing services for children in the community will begin by getting to know the community very well, from a child’s perspective. They will analyze the community systematically, gathering demographic data and information about the places, organizations, institutions, and people who are important in the lives of the children and families who live there. They will make personal contact with teachers, principals, storekeepers, day care providers, soccer coaches, religious leaders, PTA presidents, pediatricians, and others who interact with children. They will conduct interviews and focus groups with key individuals who can tell them what it is like to raise children or to be a child in that community. They will form cooperative relationships that can develop into partnerships for the good of the children.
After performing their initial analysis, librarians will monitor the com- munity to detect shifts in the population and emerging issues of concern.
They will know when crime is an issue and when parents are concerned about leadership in the schools. They will know where children can ride their bicycles safely and where they like to spend their allowances. By remaining active in the life of the community, librarians will not only acquire intimate knowledge of the children they serve; they will also establish their credibility and commitment.
Children’s librarians will use the knowledge acquired from their ongoing environmental scans as the basis for the library services they provide. If their research shows that most school-age children are in home day care arrange- ments, they will look for ways to bring books and information services to those locations. If lack of day care is a problem, they will work with commu- nity leaders to find a solution and may offer to develop after-school programs at the library. If public meeting space is scarce, they will make the library’s community room available to local organizations. If it has been difficult to recruit adult sponsors for youth groups, they may volunteer to lead one themselves.
Knowledge of the community will determine the library’s service hours, the focus of the collection, and the ways in which technology is used. The library will also be a central resource for people to learn more about the com- munity. Adults will look to the library for local information or referrals to sources of help. Kids might work with an adult staff member or volunteer to develop a database of helpful information—lists of good places to skateboard or play Frisbee, book and movie reviews, contacts for clubs and youth organiza- tions, notices of special events. They might publish an electronic newsletter
with similar information as well as samples of their own creative writing and editorials about topics of interest to kids.