Your new post is loading...
Anyone who works in the LIS field knows that librarians spend a pretty good chunk of their day explaining why their jobs are important/still relevant in the Age of Google. It’s exhausting, to say the least, but I’ve come to realize that these conversations are absolutely vital. As stories of library closures and funding cuts continue to permeate our news cycle, it’s becoming more and more important that we learn to speak up and defend our work — not just for the sake of our careers, but for the benefit of the communities we serve.
Since transitioning from public to school libraries last year, I’ve become much more concerned with the state of our province’s school library programs. Did you know that in 2017 only 52% of elementary schools in Ontario reported having a full- or part-time teacher librarian? (To put things into perspective, that’s down from 80% in 1998.) The regional inequities are also disturbing: while 93% of elementary schools in central Ontario are staffed by a librarian, only 11% of northern libraries are.
