Pursuing excellence for library service to children
Interview with Stephanie Smallwood, Youth Services Coordinator for the Springfield Greene County Library District discussing various ways to advocate for early literacy and libraries.
From 1919 to 1948, Louise Payson Latimer was the Director of Work with Children at the Washington (DC) Public Library. Latimer received frequent requests for “hard-to-access visual material” as well as general community members who were interested in the illustrations within children’s books during her tenure with the system. This prompted her to initiate the DC Public Library’s Illustrator Collection. At the time, Latimer recommended that the library purchase upwards of 800 picture books that she deemed worthy of “merit”. The collection now houses upwards of 20,000 primarily British and American books, many of which are first editions. To find out more about this interesting and unique collection, I interviewed Wendy Lukehart. Wendy is the Youth Collections Coordinator at DC Public Library and author of the article Louise Payson Latimer: Pioneer of Library Service to Children in Washington, DC. Wendy has become a fierce advocate for the collection, and one…