If books are forever being written off, they’ve got nothing on librarians. And for such a weird reason. As if the mess that is the Internet isn’t the best object lesson of all on the need for curation, by someone who knows what she is doing.
The American Library Association realizes it has an image problem, though, unfairly or not. Thus its annual I Love My Librarian award, given to 10 people who excel at their profession, of the 166,000 in the trade.
I sat down last week in her library with one of this year’s winners, Sherri Ginsberg of Hillsides, the 104-year-old former Los Angeles County orphanage on Avenue 64 in Pasadena that today serves hundreds of kids who have suffered trauma, or who have severe emotional challenges requiring specialized care and treatment.
I think it’s in such special circumstances that a librarian can really shine, and clearly so did the ALA. In her 10 years at the campus, which serves both young people who can’t live at home and those who are day students, Ginsberg has radically changed the library space she inherited, formerly used only for after-class visits and now a hub of activity on the campus. She built new bookshelves. She had couches specially designed to encourage creative loafing while magazine-leafing. Children dropped in throughout our visit, to enquire about books or to return some.
Often operating in loco parentis, Ginsberg has to discourage some choices and slyly push others. “Of course a lot of the YA books these days are the vampires, the dystopians. And then there’s gangs, drugs, sex, rock ’n’ roll. A lot of those books I don’t really have in here. I go for the classics.” I pointed to “Anne of Green Gables” on a shelf. “Yes — but the truth is, no one has checked that out. I realize I’m in a population that I can’t make interested only in what I’m interested in.”
With a group of what she terms “high-interest, low-level readers,” she knows that there often has to be a compelling hook to lure her students into cracking a book, and that often involves personal visits by authors.
“They love judges, for instance, because so many have been in the legal system themselves. They always want the judges to recount their most gruesome cases. And I try not to just have celebrities, but …” But Ginsberg is really good at snagging them. “Did you know that Kristi Yamaguchi,” the Olympic figure skater, “was born with club feet?” I did not, nor that she has written a children’s book. Ginsberg got her to campus, and the kids loved her story.
“I went after Henry Winkler,” the Fonz from “Happy Days,” because of his series of Hank Zipzer books about a boy with learning challenges — Winkler is dyslexic himself, as is a son. “He told me he would come, but that he was busy for the next three years. Almost three years to the day from our meeting, he came to Hillsides.”
She brings ballerinas, hip-hop artists, tap dancers, a guy who plays the typewriter as a musical instrument, conductor Rachael Worby and her Muse/ique orchestra. “A guy from Nashville came out and worked with the kids to write lyrics through his singmeastory.org and they sent them back to have musicans turn them into songs and then sent them back recorded.”
She brought Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Little Rock High School in 1957. “Just the fact that he had touched Martin Luther King’s hand — that got them so motivated to explore more books in the library.”
She brought in a 160-pound Tibetan mastiff dog, “because he looks like he’s listening, and they love to read to him. A dog doesn’t have any form of criticism at all.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
