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| Image property of author: Me |
Confession: I like actual, physical, tangible books. Sure, e-books and audio books are great. I commute more than 3 hours each day, 3 days a week to get to the Junior Kindergarten through Grade 8 school where I have volunteered at the library since 2014. Without Jim Dale or Lauren Fortgang or Andy Serkis narrating my favorite stories, I would go mad idling in my tiny car on the 90/94. I sit on the local library board for my community, and witness the ease and excitement created by new library technologies such as remote locker pick ups & Artificial Intelligence-aided search tools. I coach middle school students who want to chat about the latest TikTok trends and anime shows before we launch into talking about books. I get it. Quiet, static, non-linked, single modal books can barely compete with the hyperlinked blog, the viral post (look how I blog for the first time...very demure, very mindful...), the Google search engine.
Still, I like books and I love being the gateway dealer of books with all their messy, radical, upsetting, soothing, passionate, uplifting contents. My clients are kids. I find common ground with those students who also love books and who eagerly join our school's book clubs and throw themselves into competitions like the Chicago Public School's Battle of the Books. But it is even more satisfying, gives me even more life, when I help find that perfect book for the student who hates books in September, yet can't put a particular book down and can't stop talking about it by December. Two years ago it was Lindsay Currie's Chicagoland horror story, Scritch Scratch. Last year it was John Lewis' graphic novel, March.
In addition to my affinity for books and my mission to get more kids to read them, there is another piece to what I have to admit is my wariness when it comes to incorporating technology in the school library: I am not a native speaker. I don't fluently speak tech. My Gen Z son & daughter do and, bless them, are just a text away when I need their help. My Gen Alpha students most certainly do. And since I need to communicate with them and eventually with the generation that will come after them, I need to get as fluent in tech as I am with English, and even more comfortable with it than I am with Mandarin.
Technology belongs in the school library because kids belong there. In fact, school libraries staffed by librarians are the most important thing in promoting literacy for young people and raising scores in both reading and math. Moreover, the school to prison pipeline cannot be broken without the existence of lively, modern, technology-rich school libraries where students feel comfortable to explore books and other media, with the assistance of the latest innovations, thereby promoting literacies of all kinds.
But the link between literacies (reading/math/media/information/social emotional/etc) and school libraries is a discussion for a different post. If we simply assume that kids need libraries, then we have to assume that librarians need to speak their languages, including the many languages of technology. And if that's the case, then so do I.
