Newsletter of the Section for Libraries Serving Disadvantaged Persons

Issue 44
Spring 1997

Editorial

On March 3 - 4, 1997, eleven members of the Standing Committee of the Section for Libraries Serving Disadvantaged Persons assembled in New York for the Winter Meeting of the Section. John Day and Sue Lithgow volunteered to send reports on the meetings, which took place at the Dag Hammarskjold Library of the United Nations and the new Science, Business and Industry Library, (SIBL) which is part of the New York Public Library respectively.

The series on News of the World articles on the public library situation in the various countries represented by SC members continues in this issue, and gives a snapshot of the current situation as well as the work being done by each of our members.

As services to the Elderly is part of the mandate of the SC, an article by Kirsty Williamson, Amanda Bow and Karen Wale, entitled Older People and the Internet, is included in this issue. This article appeared in the March issue of Link-Up, the publication of the National Library of Australia, which is the national forum for issues relating to services in Australian libraries in the areas of cultural diversity, literacy and disability. The Section has permission to reproduce items from this journal.

Table of Contents

Mid Year Meeting

Day 1 - United Nations Dag Hammarskjold Library

The members of the Standing Committee for Libraries Serving Disadvantaged Persons met early on Monday morning, March 3, on First Avenue outside the Visitors' Entrance to the United Nations Building in New York City. Our hostess, Ms. Vibeke Beck, Chief of the User Services Section, distributed our visitor identification badges and, after passing through the stringent security check, we were given access to the United Nations Building.

Both our morning and afternoon meetings were held inside the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold Library and the Standing Committee completed approximately one half of its Midyear Meeting agenda with discussion of the minutes of the 1996 Beijing conference, the Chair's Report, the Financial Report, Reports from the Standing Committee Members, some of the Committee's Ongoing Projects, and a discussion of the new Reporting Guidelines from IFLA Headquarters.

Of particular interest were the review of Bror Tronbacke's draft of the "Guidelines for Easy-to-read" and a report from Gary Strong, Director of the Queens Public Library. The draft "Guidelines for Easy-to-Read" were very well received by the Standing Committee and accepted with very few suggested changes. These guidelines are expected to be printed and available to the public in the near future, once they move through the standard IFLA publications review and acceptance procedures. Mr. Strong gave a very interesting and informative report on the activities of the Queens Public Library, one of the largest libraries in the United States and the library which serves the New York City borough with the most culturally diverse population.

The Standing Committee suspended its meeting temporarily in order to have lunch in the United Nations Delegate Dining Room and that was particularly interesting as there were persons of a very wide variety of nationalities there who were on business at the United Nations. Coincidentally, the Delegates Dining Room has one wall of floor-to-ceiling glass which gives a wonderful view across the river to the Borough of Queens and the Queensborough Bridge, giving us the opportunity to ask additional questions of Mr. Strong about that part of New York City and the community his library serves.

After Lunch, the Standing Committee members were given the unique opportunity to have a guided tour of the Dag Hammarskjold Library, seeing its various collections and services, including the extensive Map Collection. Additionally, we had the pleasure of an informal meeting with the Library's Director, Ms. el-Erian. Upon leaving the tour and returning to our Standing Committee meeting for the afternoon, the members had the pleasure of marveling that it had begun to snow, an unexpected treat for those who live in more moderate climates.

---John M. Day jmday@gallua.gallaudet.edu

Day Two - New York Public Library, Science, Industry and Business Library

The venue Day two of the Mid Year meeting was held in the Science, Business and Industry Library (SIBL). This state-of-the-art $100 million library was opened in May 1996, thanks to a public/private sector funding partnership. It is one of New York Public Library's four research centres and is currently the world's largest public information centre devoted solely to science and business.

SIBL's research collection boasts a stock of 1.2 million books, over 110,000 periodical titles, an extensive patents collection and a further 1 million items on microform. This is complemented by a 50,000 volume circulating collection and an equally impressive array of local and international electronic resources.

SIBL also offers a range of science and business services to meet the needs of its users. These include; the McGraw Information Services Center, Small Business Information Service, International Trade Resources Service and a Science Education Program. There are also a number of fee-based services available too.

In an attempt to maximise access to its resources, SIBL offers a range of appropriate computer training courses. Demand for these is at a premium, as is the demand for SIBL as a whole, which has enjoyed a highly successful first year of operation.

The meeting Day two of LSDP, Mid Year meeting proved to be as action packed and productive as its first. The main achievements were as follows;

A considerable amount of time was spent discussing Conference Planning. In particular, details had to be finalised for Copenhagen regarding speakers for the Section's Open Session, together with an advertising strategy for the Dyslexia workshop. Looking ahead, a Section theme was needed for the 1998 conference in Amsterdam. The Committee finally agreed upon, 'Library and information services to diverse populations: trends and developments'.

Day two was also taken up by lengthy discussions regarding the Medium Term Programme. With the Section's 'Goals' approved it was now time to formalise 'Action Plans' to demonstrate how these goals were to be achieved.

The Committee was also pleased to welcome Allan Kleiman, who attended day two of the meeting as an observer. Allan specialises in library and information services to the elderly and provided a fascinating introduction to the issue of the aging population and its implications for library and information service providers. Allan hopes to become a SC member and his expertise and experience will mark a valuable addition to the Committee's subject specialisms. Allan plans to present a paper at a future IFLA General Conference and hopefully this will support the proposed LSDP project for services to the elderly.

Membership discussions brought the meeting to a close and after two highly successful days, members left New York anxious to enlist as many new recruits to the Section as possible!

---Sue Lithgow

Table of Contents

March 1997 Standing Committee Meeting in New York

Carmé Mayol, Barcelona.

Carmé is working on the preparation of a Workshop for Hospital Libraries to be held in October 1997. She is a member of the Scientific Committee for this event.

Carmé is also in contact with various public institutions at the State and regional level, to establish in Spain and/or in Catalonia, an Easy-to-Read Committee or Group.

This is the third year in which Carmé is lecturing at the Library School at the University of Barcelona on the topic of special services in libraries. In the course she prepares, together with the students, 10 or 12 practical works in different libraries on services to disadvantaged persons.

Bror Tornbacke, Stockholm.

During the last year he and his team have been preparing easy-to-use and easy-to-understand products for electronic media, especially CD-Rom publications.

In at least some cases he is planning to do this work together with other countries, as a joint venture of try-out-work. Hopefully this work will be funded by the European Union. He hopes to get started during 1997.

The subjects to be covered will be as follows:

- news information
- intellectually disabled persons and sexuality
- medieval times

John Day, Washington.

The Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA), a Divisions of the American Library Association, published in 1996 the Guidelines for Library Services to the American Deaf Community. These Guidelines were closely based on the IFLA Guidelines for Library Services to Deaf People. (authored by John Day).

At its February 1996 meeting, the Library Services to the Deaf Forum worked on revitalizing its project to develop an implementation manual for the Guidelines.

John Day is completing his double term on the Standing Committee, from 1989 to 1997, and much to our regret, will be leaving the group in August, 1997 in Copenhagen.

Anne Galler, Montreal.

Anne has completed her work on the Survey of Library Schools, questioning them on what is being done in their curricula vis-à-vis the disadvantaged.

She is analyzing the results, and IFLA Journal has agreed to publish her article on the topic in a future issue of the journal.

Anne is also working on the history of the Section, and would welcome any information helping her with data on the subject, especially as regards the founding of the section and the early days.

As John Day, Anne is completing her second set of four years with the Section, and will be leaving it in August, 1997. However, her work on the history will continue beyond her term of office.

Maria Teresa Pages, Barcelona.

Teresa is also working on the workshop regarding Hospital Libraries to be held in October 1997, and is member of the same committee as Carmé, namely the Scientific Committee.

Teresa is working on an enquiry which she sent to public libraries in Catalonia, regarding specialized services and their expansion in the region. Her questionnaire in Catalan is enclosed.

Teresa is also collecting information about housebound service in the region, in order to record the highlights for the public library service in Catalania. She is also preparing a questionnaire regarding the same service which she will send to members of the Standing Committee for Services to Disadvantaged Persons.

Dr. Nancy Panella, New York.

Nancy explains that due to the dirth of published literature on hospital patients' libraries, and because no recent surveys of the field have been done, the status of library service to hospitalized people in the United States is unclear. However, it appears that at least in the New York City metropolitan area, these libraries and library services have been diminished, or discontinued altogether.

Perhaps a major factor in the presumed reduction or elimination of libraries/services is the recent introduction in the New York aarea of so-called "managed care health services", a method of insured care that aims to dramatically reduce the length of stay in hospitals. These reduced hospital says mean tha patients are not in the hospital long enough to need or require many of the ancillary services - such as libraries/library materials, traditionally available to them.

It appears that public libraries in particular are having difficulty trying to provide services to hospitals since often pateints have come and gove before the outreach librarian has made his/her semi-weekly visits.

Table of Contents

News from Around the World

Spain

Ms. Luisa Toran, Head of the Provincial Center of Coordinating Libraries in Malaga (Spain) is instituting a pilot project that will provide books and other reading materials for the patients in hospitals in the city of Malaga, beginning with the children's section.

The project will be funded by the Consejeria de Cultura of the Andalusian government and is supported by volunteers, under the supervision of the technical staff of the Coordinating Center.

Up to now, libraries in hospitals have been developed for the medical staff only, but not for the patients.

At the present moment, Toran is involved with hospital and volunteers to study the reading interests of patients in order to enable them to select special materials. The purpose of this project is to make available the services of public libraries to those persons who are spending long periods of inactivity, and to support the educational tasks for children in hospitals, which will include the lending of books as well as activities such as story-telling and other educational games.

If this program will be successful, Toran will try to extend this type of service into prisons and to other disadvantaged groups.

--- Luisa Toran, Malaga, Spain

Sweden

Swedish library services to disadvantaged persons 1996/97

After struggling for many years, Sweden, last among the Nordic countries, has finally passed public library legislation. It is hoped that this new legislation will be a great help to the public library service, most particularly to the disadvantaged persons, because it stresses that special attention must be paid to both school libraries and services to the disabled.

It is also hoped that together with the new legislation, the government will also fund the special services to the disadvantaged.

The first step in this direction is a survey that the Department of Cultural Affairs is undertaking in the near future, in order to determine how library services are dispensed in the country today. Unfortunately, hospital library service was severely cut back last year in some parts of Sweden. However, it is hoped that by reorganizing hospital libraries, along more modern lines, this service will also be revived.

On the positive side, a very successful campaign has been conducted in Sweden to remedy Dyslexia. The purpose was to help both children and adults with appropriate materials placed in public libraries.

This successful campaign is being translated into a full day workshop on Dyslexia to be held during the upcoming IFLA General Conference in Copenhagen, August 1997.

---Kjerstin Thulin, Stockholm, Sweden.

United Kingdom

The Public Libraries Review

In February 1997, the Department for National Heritage published the much awaited document Reading the future: the public libraries review. A brief look at some of its main points will provide a useful insight into UK public library developments.

In particular, the Review acknowledged the importance of IT developments stating that public libraries will need to Ôadapt to new ways of delivering the serviceÕ and be actively involved in the governmentÕs ÔIT for ALLÕ programme, which aims to Ôraise public awareness of the benefits of information technologyÕ. Such aspirations were backed up by the announcement that public libraries stand to benefit from the National Lottery funding that the Government plans to Ôdirect towards the wider introduction of information and communication technology after the millenniumÕ.

Another key feature of the Review is that from April 1998, each authority will be expected to provide a Public Library Plan. These Plans will include existing Audit Commission performance indicators together with a range of additional indicators. Public Library performance will therefore be analysed on a national scale with inter-authority comparisons.

The Review also concluded that public libraries should; Ôbe open when their users want them to beÕ Ôprovide opportunities for learning and self-improvement, for businesses, the local community and in developing young peopleÕ Ôincrease financial and other support form outside the public sectorÕ.

The initial response from the library profession to this Review has been mixed. There is obviously much discussion to follow but whatever the outcome Reading the future will be a crucial campaigning document for the future of public libraries.

New post

Sue also announced her new job as Development Officer in the Open Learning Unit (OLU) within Aberystwyth UniversityÕs Department of Information and Library Studies. The Open Learning Unit was set up in 1993 to support and develop a BSc distance learning degree scheme in information and library studies. The Department has over ten yearsÕ experience of distance learning masters programmes for professional librarians and information workers and the BSc has proved to be an exciting and challenging addition to this portfolio, bringing the total number of DL students to over 500.

Sue will maintain her links with the prison library service, and whilst this new job represents quite a change of direction, it is still of direct relevance to the Section as Open Learning is central to the needs of providing library and information services to the disadvantaged.

--- Sue Lithgow

United States

On September 30, new federal library legislation, the Library Services & Technology Act (LSTA), was passed as a successor to the more than 30 year old Library Services & Construction Act (LSCA). LSTA authorizes funding in the amount of $150 million per year and focuses on information access through technology and information empowerment through special services. LSTA defines a number of roles the federal government can play in furthering library and information development, including the role of identifying, preserving, and sharing library resources across institutional, local and state boundaries. The LSTA grants to the states will also make it possible for local libraries to acquire special materials and make the special effort needed to reach out to those who need particular help in order to use libraries. LSTA has six major purposes, five of which are technology related, and one involves services to users with special needs:

1. Establishing or enhancing electronic linkages among or between libraries;
2. Electronically linking libraries with educa-tional, social, or information services;
3. Helping libraries gain access to information through electronic networks;
4. Encouraging libraries in different areas, and encouraging different types of libraries, to establish consortia and share resources;
5. Paying costs for libraries to acquire and share computer systems and tele-communications technologies;
6. Targeting library and information services to persons having difficulty using a library and to the underserved in urban and rural communities, including children from birth through age 17 whose families have incomes below the poverty line.

Projects within these boundaries will be administered by the states, while activities such as library and information science-related education, research, and demonstrations will be administered by a new Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C.

--- Vibeke Lehmann