School Libraries Work! Rebuilding for Learning

On Monday, June 26, the American Association of School Librarians and Scholastic Library Publishing co-sponsored a national town meeting on the role of school libraries in school recovery in the Gulf coast states. School Libraries Work! Rebuilding for Learning featured a keynote speech by First Lady Laura Bush followed by a panel discussion in which I took part. AASL has launched its own blog to provide a forum for discussion of the issues that arose, and it can be found at: http://blogs.ala.org/aasl.php.

A Scholastic brochure entitled School Libraries Work! summarizes the many studies of school library impact that began with the first and second Colorado studies. An updated 2006 edition of that brochure is available at: http://librarypublishing.scholastic.com/content/stores/LibraryStore/pages/images/slw_06.pdf.

Since then, however, studies have been released by Wisconsin and Ontario. Links to those study reports are available at: http://www.LRS.org/impact.asp, and their findings are summarized in another presentation I made in New Orleans, the PowerPoint file of which is also available on that page (i.e., The Future of School Librarianship: Review of Research and Implications for Practice).

Keith
Lance_K@cde.state.co.us