Reading Notes—Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning—Introduction

The cover of the book Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning

Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning by Sandra Hughes-Hassell

Here’s the publisher’s summary of this book:

With a renewed emphasis on facilitating learning, supporting multiple literacies, and advancing equity and inclusion, the thoroughly updated and revised second edition of this trusted text provides models and tools that will enable library staff who serve youth to create and maintain collections that provide equitable access to all youth. And as Hughes-Hassell demonstrates, the only way to do this is for collection managers to be learner-centered, confidently acting as information guides, change agents, and leaders.

Roles held by the manager of a learner-centered collection:

  • change agent
  • leader
  • learner
  • resource guide

Goals of the learner-centered collection manager:

  1. Ground collection development decisions and practices in an equity framework.
  2. Adopt a learner-centered model of collection management that guides collection decisions and demonstrates accountability in the learning process.
  3. Redefine the role of collection manager to support the concert of library staff serving as a teacher and information guide who actively centers equity in their collection development practices.
  4. Apply appropriate strategies and tools for working in the learner-centered, equity-based paradigm that demonstrates knowledge of the learner, recognition of equity issues, familiarity with educational theories, awareness of resources, and attentiveness to the uniqueness of the community the library serves.
  5. Form a community of practice that shares responsibility for defining, developing, and evaluating the development and delivery of library resources to facilitate youth learning and advance equity.

The equity framework:

  • learner-centered
  • library staff as teacher
  • library staff as information guide
  • educational theories
  • unique community
  • community of practice

An equitable access environment reflects:

  • learner characteristics
  • best practices in pedagogy
  • changes in resource knowledge base
  • partnerships with the broader learning community
  • commitment to equitable access

I often find myself watching movies in 22-minute chunks, partly because of being a parent and partly because of having a short attention span lately. I do TV shows with act breaks, so 3 or 4 breaks as I watch where commercials would be. It’s been liberating to realize I can do this. 📺🍿

📺👱‍♀️ Buffy’s experience in the episode “I, Robot… You, Jane” is super relatable. I had two friends with online boyfriends around 1997 and I wasn’t sure about them (though I became friends with these boyfriends). Fortunately, they weren’t digitized demons. Just teen boys.

📚 It's cozy fantasy season!

I think between reading a few Gothics (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House, The Hacienda) and watching Mike Flanagan shows, I’ve scratched my Gothic itch and it’s now time for me to turn to cozy reading. And because I’m me, that means cozy fantasy.

I first learned about Cozy Fantasy when I heard about Wyngraf Magazine, which I think I learned about in the Signal Boost section of Alasdair Stuart’s The Full Lid, which I learned about because it was a Hugo nominee for best fanzine. And I was looking at the Hugo nominees because those are the awards from the World Science Fiction Convention aka Worldcon, which is mentioned on Wikipedia’s page on fandom as an early and ongoing convention. (Yes, this is an example of how my web wanderings work and how much I love to live the dream of the 1990s.)

The note about Wyngraf talked about fantasy in the vein of The Hobbit and Redwall and I thought it sounded good and like exactly what I needed in a world that has been both personally and globally terrifying for years.

Cozy fantasy is exactly what it sounds like: a cozy mystery with magic instead of murder. (Some cozy fantasy is also cozy mystery.)

Here are some cozy fantasy titles I’ve read in the past few years:

I’ve read the first issue of Wyngraf and am a little ways into the second. I believe I’ve read all the flash fiction on their website. I have the other issues, as well as their book of cozy poetry and a book compiling their flash fiction. I own the ebook of Bard City Blues. I’m currently debating whether to also buy the paperback. (Leaning toward yes.)

Cozy is a vibe: good food, good friends, low stakes. Things like opening a coffee shop or hunting for the tavern cat who’s gone missing (he’s fine, just stuck somewhere). It’s the fantasy version of a Hallmark holiday movie.

Want to join me in reading some?

Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash

A book is open on a table. A fire in a fireplace is in the background.

LinkedIn: Recommended job for you! FBI Special Agent!
Me: Ooh, I wonder if I can get assigned to The X-Files.

Yesterday the House Committee on Education held a session called Protecting Kids: Combatting Graphic, Explicit Materials in School Libraries. In this session, some of the witnesses claimed that they didn’t want to ban books, only remove them from school libraries. They claimed that any book you can still purchase is not banned. But what they didn’t discuss is that not everyone has the funds to buy the books they want to remove. Parents have to decide for themselves whether they should control what their own children read. But they certainly shouldn’t control what other people’s children read. If you’re in the US, please consider using this tool from the American Library Association to contact your legislators and ask them to protect the freedom to read.

A banner reads "Protect the Freedom to Read"

Finished reading: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚

Great all the way through but extra compelling for the last third. Like Mexican Gothic, it uses Gothic tropes of a spooky house and a mysterious husband to interrogate colonialism in Mexico. Highly recommend.

I’m having one of those days where you give yourself credit for every single thing you do. So here’s what my work task list looks like today so far.

✅ Download Word.
✅ Install Word.
✅ Download report with comments.
✅ Open report.
✅ Get paper from studio.
✅ Put paper in printer.
✅ Print report.

On visiting Paris 🇫🇷

I’ve been obsessed with Paris as long as I can remember. Maybe it’s because I was born on Bastille Day. Maybe I read Madeline at an early age. Maybe it didn’t get into full swing until I saw a kid perform Music of the Night from The Phantom of the Opera in full costume at a school concert in fourth grade.

Whatever the origin of this obsession, I feared when I finally got to travel to Paris this past spring as I accompanied my husband on his Fulbright Award travel, I would discover that Paris wasn’t for me. After a long day of travel on the Eurostar from London, carrying full suitcases on escalators and stairs, and going the wrong way on the RER, while my 6 year old complained most of the trip, I was exhausted, sweaty, and cranky.

But when I stepped onto the street out of the RER station, all of that faded into the background. Paris immediately took my breath away. The Hausmann architecture. The lights. The Art Nouveau vibes of the Printemps department store building. I felt like I had found my heart’s true home.

We stayed in a nearby garden city, Le Vésinet, for two weeks. Every day, when we walked home from the train station after going into the city, we stopped in at a boulangerie that was on our way home and picked up fresh baguettes and pain de campagne. We went to the Jardin du Luxembourg and my son sailed a boat on their big pond. We toured the Palais Garnier, where The Phantom of the Opera is set.

The whole place exceeded my every expectation and I eagerly look forward to going back.