Maryland Library Association, Ocean City, Maryland
May 14-16, 2008
Susan Modak, Librarian, Noyes Library for Young Children

Thanks very much to MCPL for supporting my attendance at MLA this year.
Here are my highlights:

Maryland Author Award luncheon honoring Marita Golden. She gave a talk about what being a lifelong reader has meant to her. Her next book will be developed from her interviews with 12 or so famous people/writers will be titled, Why I Read, Why I Write. She talked about the benefits of being let loose in the library as a youngster, “unguided and unassigned.” And that being a reader has afforded her a “legacy of connectedness.”

Very nice to see and hear her, however, I was also interested in observing the workings of the 2007 Blue Crab Committee as it presents the Blue Crab award plaques (for best easy/transitional childrens books, fiction and non) at this luncheon. I'm on the committee for next year's award so it was very helpful to see what that involves.

Blue Crab Award session - After the luncheon, at a separate event, the Blue Crab authors present about their books and the Blue Crab Committee explains their mission. This is one opportunity for them to recruit committee members. This year’s author, David Bjerklie, told how his book, Butterflies!, came to be in the setting of Time, Inc.’s Time for Kids Division. He told us that while it is difficult enough to get science information right for adults; it’s doubly difficult to present information clearly, accurately and appropriately for various levels of children’s materials.

Outreach Interest Group Meeting - held to see if there’s sufficient interest for MLA to sanction an Interest Group, preliminary to the forming of a new Division, devoted to the subject of Outreach. About 20 people showed up to talk about library outreach, many of them specifically interested in Mobile Services, some in Corrections-based library service and some, like me, generally interested in the concept of library outreach but not currently involved in those specialized areas. I volunteered to help out on the Wiki. Ha! I’ve never done that, so it’ll be a learning opportunity, for sure.

At work in your P.J.’s - Three library staff around Maryland who work completely or partly by telecommuting talked about pros and cons of working from somewhere (anywhere, not just home) outside the library building, important considerations in setting up a telecommuting work situation, how to find out more from telecommuting websites, etc.

One presenter was a University of Maryland library administrator with a very long commute who works on administrative and other tasks from home one day a week. The other two work mainly by telecommuting: one, a web developer and outreach librarian at MDSE/Correctional Education and the other a project coordinator for Ask Us Now!

Promoting School Readiness: A successful research initiative involving home childcare providers

This project was funded by an LSTA grant. In 2004, it was found that only 2% of childcare providers in Carroll County had any kind of early literacy training. Childcare providers in the community were solicited to take part in the CCPL project, half were set aside as a control group. The children in the caregiver homes were tested using an appropriately gentle, fun, but effective early literacy assessment (ELSA, sounds nice, doesn’t it?, like a sweet cow).

In the Fall, the caregivers were given three hours of training in early literacy theory and strategies and a big trunk of fun, useful materials for play and crafts. The project staff communicated with the trainees by telephone and newsletter until the follow-up training in the Spring. The Spring training allowed for the childcare providers to share what they had learned and used since the earlier training. Additionally, the childcare providers involved in the project, generally isolated from each other, formed a supportive relationship.

The children were assessed again at the end and their gains were substantially greater than in the control group. Additionally, through their training, the childcare providers became valued and legitimized sources of science-based early literacy information to the children’s parents.

In the second year the control group received the ‘treatment’ and had similar results.

In a separate LSTA grant, library staff from St. Mary’s County piggy-backed off the findings from the Carroll County project and developed their own project to visit childcare providers in homes and businesses to provide storytimes, as well as training and fun materials for staff. They used part of their grant to purchase and decorate a van to use as they visited around their county. The project and the van were identified by the acronym W.O.W.! Words on Wheels. St. Mary’s also developed a terrifically successful product: a clear backpack with books, music, toys etc. very much like our storycare kits of old, but meant to be checked out by kids and parents. There are 200 kits among the branches, on many different themes and they are almost always all checked out.

Another cool project from this county: as an aid to parents and caregivers, certain books with especially good early literacy skill-building potential contain a sticker on the inside cover. This custom-made sticker lists some early literacy activities suited to that book and gives an example of an open-ended question one might ask about that book’s story.

This takes the practice of telling parents and caregivers about enhanced book-reading strategies and reinforces it with appropriate reminders and suggestions keyed to a particular title. TERRIFIC! The books with this enhancement have a spine label to identify them and are rarely sitting on the shelf.

So, between the various partners in Carroll County for the first project to training caregivers and support them and the off-shoot in St Mary’s to repeatedly visit childcare settings, this was really an amazing project with many benefits to the various groups involved. The presentation team at MLA2008, which includes one of the home daycare providers, had presented their workshop at the Intl. Reading Association earlier in May and will present it again at ALA later this month.