The first talk had a youth services perspective and was presented by Michele Farrell of the Institute of Museum & Library Services and Enid Costly of the Library of Virginia.
The talk started with a brief overview of the history of the role of public libraries in literacy in general and children's literacy in specific. As computers and Internet technologies have become a more important part of functioning in society it has become more important to make sure children have access to such equipment and learn to properly use it, and in some cases use it for improving more conventional literacy skills. The focus here is largely low income children as a statistic mentioned in the talk indicated that 83% of low income children who have completed third grade have not reached the ability to read at the third grade level.
The speakers mentioned a variety of resources that have been found useful with digital literacy and children:
StoryBlocks – a collection of 30-60 second videos to model songs, rhymes, and finger plays for young children
DaybyDay – Different activities each day that have been put together by different states (daybydaysc.org, daybydayva.org, daybyday.id.org) Virginia will be translating DayByDay into Spanish.
Colorin' Colorado – A bilingual site from Colorado.
In addition to sites like this, libraries are doing a lot of work with iPads. Casa Grande Library in Arizona is doing interactive storytimes with a tablet and in many places iPads are replacing the AWE Early Literature Station computers.
Thy also mentioned a few literacy sources for different audiences. Everyone On (www.everyoneon.org) and www.digitalliteracy.gov are general audience sites. There's a site called
Project Enable (projectenable.syr.edu) which is a project to train school librarians to create effective library services for students with disabilities.
Following this talk was a talk I found more interesting and specific to my interests and the needs that I perceive at the library at which I work. Matt Mongomery and Jeremy Snell from Mechanics' Institute Library gave this presentation.
Mechanics' Institute Library is a membership library in San Francisco with 4500 members. They have many people who have historically come to the reference desk for assistance with e-readers, gadgets and computers. In May 2012, in order to better serve people with these needs, they made themselves available for an hour on a regular basis and patrons could make a 15 minute appointment. They rapidly discovered that for most issues, 15 minutes was not enough time. They modified the program and in July 2012 they started a monthly 6 hour run with 30 minute appointments.
They created a schedule in a Google Docs spreadsheet and entered into the spreadsheet the topic on which the patron needed assistance. They have so far assisted 69 people for a total of 38 hours. Their members like it and they are getting unsolicited “thank you” emails from members.
They have found the following benefits from their program:
- More one-on-one time with your service population
- Learn about the unique digital literacy needs of your community
- Grow your formal classes to address some of these needs
We already do some things like this, but I think we could learn from this program and start doing a broader kind of thing than what we are currently doing, which is either limited to discussion of library resources or not advertised and is scheduled on request by patrons that know we will help them will all sorts of things if they ask.
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