Check It Out: Diverse Images of the Library Experience in Children's Literature

Abstract

This article provides an exploration of children's literature featuring contemporary and historical images of libraries as settings for empowering diversity and influencing reading attitudes and behaviors. The featured selections focus on personal, family, community, and international library experiences and events. The protagonists represented include individuals of racial, ethnic, and language diversity. Both women and men are featured as librarians and both girls and boys as library patrons. The featured selections, representing a variety of genres, provide empowering images and positive messages about the love of reading, specifically in the context of the library community. Introduction The library is a place where most of the things I came to value as an adult had their beginnings. (Griliches, 1996, p. 67) Reflecting on my own midwestern childhood of the 1950s, I can relate to the importance of the library in my personal life. In our small town, the local Andrew Carnegie Public Library was just down the street from the elementary school and around the corner from the main-street bank and drugstore. It was an easy two-block walk from school and an inviting stop on the way home. With the continual encouragement of my mother, an avid reader herself, I would regularly stop at our local library to browse the shelves, hoping to discover new adventures in a book. Our local librarian, who had considerable life experience and an unlimited knowledge of books, was a model of intellectual curiosity and an enthusiastic mentor for all readers, often recommending books to match our evolving interests and abilities. This early bonding with a librarian and the library experience allowed me to feel nurtured and intellectually stimulated in the public libraries of my youth as well as the many research libraries of my adult future. During the past two decades, the themes of trade books have changed significantly, among these an increase in the quantity and quality of children's literature about libraries and librarians. In each of these selections, the authors and illustrators promote the power of books and love of reading, all in the context of the library experience. Seasoned library patrons may recognize themselves and others between the pages of these books. One hopes that young and developing readers will be encouraged to identify with empowered protagonists who enjoy stories, read and write books, visit the library, and regularly use their library cards. The following selections focus on personal, family, community, and global library events and experiences. Representation includes protagonists of racial, ethnic, and language diversity; and family contexts range from single-parent to extended families. Images are included of both male and female protagonists as librarians and library patrons. The publications also represent a variety of genres: nonfiction, biographical and informational, historical fiction, realistic fiction, modern fantasy, and poetry. These diverse selections of children's literature also provide strong messages about discrimination of marginalized populations with regard to access to books and libraries as well as empowering images that have emerged with ensuing social change. Each of these unique publications promotes positive images of reading in the context of the library experience. Some Remarkable Librarians A unique nonfiction picture book is The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky (1994). For this biography, the author completed research on the life of Eratosthenes, a Greek student of mathematics, science, and philosophy, who later became a chronologist and author. Eratosthenes was appointed chief librarian of the Alexandria Library in Egypt, where he helped readers and writers with their research while supervising 40 librarians who organized and maintained 700,000 papyrus scrolls. Double-spread illustrations by Kevin Hawkes extend Lasky's imaginative text, lending credibility to the images of larger-than-life libraries of the ancient world. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.