Teacher-librarian’s tradition of stepping to service

I’ll take testimonials for our books where I can get them. A couple weeks ago, Sara Kelly Johns, American Association of School Librarians president-elect and a library media specialist in Lake Placid, New York, walked by my office and stopped for a moment to chat. I keep our most recent titles faced on my bookshelf, and she noticed New on the Job, by Ruth Toor and Hilda K. Weisburg. Sara told me she has shared the books from her professional collection with a soon-to-be-certified colleague who is educating herself with library literature. This reader praised New on the Job for its practical overview of the field. Her regret was that the book wasn’t around soon enough to be the first that she read.

I asked Sara to talk it up, and she must have. We recently received a state-wide order for 150 copies. Wow! Talk about results.

New on the Job is the latest iteration in ALA’s tradition of offering a basic manual for school librarians. I can trace it to the 1975 publication Steps to Service, by Mildred Nickel, who revised the book in 1984. The two editions sold 25,000 copies. It was succeeded by Policymaking for School Library Media Specialists (1989), which took a more philosophical approach, but was decidedly less popular. Early on in my time at ALA, Don Adcock, then deputy director at AASL, urged me to publish a successor. Then, maybe still, the most common information request to AASL was for advice on basic procedures of how to run a school library media center. He recommended Ann Wasman as an author, and we published her New Steps to Service in 1998. Also successful, the book is often used as a complement to Information Power in introductory courses on school librarianship. Wasman is retired from the field, and when it came time for the next book, I needed to look elsewhere.

Consulting editor Susan Veccia recruited long-time writers Toor and Weisburg to the task. For more than 25 years, they had been publishing practical advice for the field in their newsletter School Librarian’s Workshop, and they delivered as we knew they would.

It’s job-hunting season for school library media specialists. If you’ll be new on the job this fall, take a look.