{"id":31577,"date":"2024-09-20T17:00:57","date_gmt":"2024-09-20T21:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=31577"},"modified":"2024-09-20T12:17:59","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T16:17:59","slug":"laughter-and-tears-as-meg-medina-opens-alsc24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2024\/09\/laughter-and-tears-as-meg-medina-opens-alsc24\/","title":{"rendered":"Laughter and Tears as Meg Medina Opens #alsc24"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It was one of those interview-style opening sessions that left me laughing, a little teary-eyed here and there, and furiously typing notes into a blank email in my phone. Meg Medina with her humor and passion was a wonderful person for the conference task force<\/a> to invite to open this year’s conference. I am looking forward to sharing her words with many of my colleagues in my workplace because so many of the things she said echo discussions we too have been having lately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Medina said she talks with folks about “library as a verb<\/em>,” about “how to library<\/em>” and I love this so much because it speaks so well to how dynamic our library people, places, and platforms are these days. And by library people I don’t just mean us. I also mean every person who interacts with us and each other in library spaces and across library platforms. A library is more than brick and mortar and the stuff that building contains. I agree with Meg in that how we library is really the most important part. Because as she also said, “Every library belongs to all of us.<\/em>” Think about that for a moment. I know I’ll be thinking about it for awhile. Every library. All of us. No exceptions. What does that mean in practice? What does that actually look like in my day to day? This is what I’ll continue to ask myself. How do I library and what does that mean for those around me? How can I help others library the way they want to as well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another piece of last night’s library-ing I will continue to reflect on is the questions Meg posed around screens. As she said, they are a reality. They are a fact of children’s, families’, and caregivers’ lives. So how do we harness that? How do we leverage that to enhance families’ “reading lives<\/em>“? (“Reading life” is another phrase she used that is going to stick with me. More about that in just a sec.) I’ve been learning and thinking a lot about multimodal, multiplatform literacy lately and this thread of conversation wove into that so well for me. But then, Meg took it to another level for me when she asked could we in the future have books in which a chapter is perhaps another art form? Could a chapter be a video or a dance? Or a piece of oral storytelling? Or another art form that continues to engage us in the text?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The notion of children, adults, and families having a “reading life” was beautiful as well. I appreciated the touching stories Meg shared about families she’s interacted with in her visits to schools and libraries and their reading lives. But I also deeply appreciated the story she told about her own son who “left reading” when he was in middle school and now in his 30s is part of a book club! Trust they’ll come back, she said. And I think this is so important for us to take to heart as we worry about young people and their engagement (or lack thereof) with traditional novel-length texts. Just because many of them aren’t checking out a stack of hardcopy novels to read cover to cover doesn’t mean they don’t have some sort of a “reading life” and it doesn’t mean they won’t return to the long form text later in life. So how can we better meet them where they are at and trust them to define their own reading life for themselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was much more from Meg’s wisdom than I can fit in one blog post that I will be turning over in my head and heart for many days to come. If you ever have the opportunity to hear Meg Medina speak, don’t let it pass you by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Guest Contributor Kate Brunner<\/strong>\u00a0(she\/her) is Youth & Family Services Principal Consultant at the Colorado State Library. At ALSC Institute, she is looking forward to co-facilitating a session on Saturday about Colorado librarians\u2019 work developing early literacy library services for informal\/licensed-exempt childcare providers. Having been engaged in a seven-year project called\u00a0Growing Readers Together<\/em>\u00a0has led to learning a lot about Colorado\u2019s informal providers, their information needs, and how we can train library professionals to better support them. A fun fact about Kate is that, although it wasn\u2019t until mid-life that she consciously realized her dream job was in public libraries, she created her own classification system for her personal library when she was in elementary school. She only let friends borrow her books if they signed them out in her lending ledger. Kate\u2019s little Beatrix Potter books still have penciled \u201ccall numbers\u201d inside their front covers! <\/strong>The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author\u2019s alone and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was one of those interview-style opening sessions that left me laughing, a little teary-eyed here and there, and furiously typing notes into a blank email in my phone. Meg Medina with her humor and passion was a wonderful person for the conference task force to invite to open this year’s conference. I am looking forward to sharing her words with many of my colleagues in my workplace because so many of the things she said echo discussions we too have been having lately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":385,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[2854,134,151],"tags":[2862],"class_list":["post-31577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alsc-institute-2024","category-guest-blogger","category-live-blogging","tag-meg-medina"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/385"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}