Hello, friends and fellow ALSC members. I want to introduce myself to you: I’m Amy Koester, and I am the new chair of the ALSC Public Awareness Committee.<\/p>\n
In case you’re not particularly familiar with this committee, allow me to share its charge:<\/p>\n
To promote awareness of the value of excellent library service for all children. To plan, execute, coordinate, and disseminate public awareness campaigns about the importance of library service for youth. To provide public awareness learning opportunities for library staff and other stakeholders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Over the course of this next year, this committee will be working to expand public awareness of the excellent services that libraries offer to children and their families. That\u00a0means any and all services–including those that we as professionals consider to be widely known.<\/p>\n
I want to encourage you to think for a moment about the community you serve. Not just the folks who visit and use the library, but the community at large. Thinking about that community, ask yourselves some\u00a0questions. Do all families in your community:<\/p>\n
\n
- know how to get a library card? Do they understand what free services come with library card ownership?<\/li>\n
- know they can bring their children to the library for free programs?<\/li>\n
- understand\u00a0that the library is a resource and partner for the development of their young children?<\/li>\n
- recognize that the library has materials that reflect and celebrate diversity, so no matter what their family looks like, they can feel welcome?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
These are just a few questions we can start to ask ourselves when we step back from our day-to-day work and consider what, in fact, the public is aware of when it comes to library service for children. It is the work of myself and this committee to do everything we can to help bring awareness–and to help you<\/em>\u00a0bring awareness in your communities–to what the library can offer.<\/p>\n
In conjunction with that work, you’ll continue to see monthly posts from the committee here on the ALSC Blog. We aim to make these posts as useful to you as possible, so if you have particular areas of library service that you’d like your public to be more aware of, I hope you’ll share those ideas in the comments. Or, if you’d rather engage in a more private conversation, feel free to email me at amy(dot)e(dot)koester(at)gmail(dot)com.<\/p>\n
Chances are, if folks in your community don’t know about something the library offers, then folks in other communities are missing out, too. And we don’t want families and children to miss out on these excellent, vital library services just because they don’t know about them.<\/p>\n
***********************************************<\/p>\n
Amy Koester\u00a0is a Children\u2019s Librarian with\u00a0the St. Charles City-County Library District\u00a0and is writing this post for the Public Awareness Committee.<\/address>\n\u00a0<\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello, friends and fellow ALSC members. I want to introduce myself to you: I’m Amy Koester, and I am the new chair of the ALSC Public Awareness Committee. In case you’re not particularly familiar with this committee, allow me to share its charge: To promote awareness of the value of excellent library service for all children. To plan, execute, coordinate, and disseminate public awareness campaigns about the importance of library service for youth. To provide public awareness learning opportunities for library staff and other stakeholders. Over the course of this next year, this committee will be working to expand public awareness of the excellent services that libraries offer to children and their families. That\u00a0means any and all services–including those that we as professionals consider to be widely known. I want to encourage you to think for a moment about the community you serve. Not just the folks who visit and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":188,"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":[418],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-public-awareness-committee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050","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\/188"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}