Just stumbled across this undated article in the Chambersburg, PA, online newspaper, Public Opinion: School librarians meet for panel in Hershey. It provides a first-person account of the Professional Judgment Panel meeting in the Hershey area on January 10. As usual with newspaper articles, a few of the facts are scrambled. Still, it is good to see this very worthwhile project get some attention in the local media.
Two corrections: the RSL Research Group team of which I’m part has not done all of the school library impact studies (19 are mentioned in the article). We have been involved in a dozen or so of the almost two dozen studies we know of; but other research teams besides ours have conducted some of the studies–something we applaud. Also, the article suggests that surveys of librarians, teachers, and administrators have already taken place. In fact, we are only about to solicit librarian volunteers for their survey and to ask them to nominate teachers and administrators for those surveys. The three surveys instruments will be pretested this month, and administered in March and April.
Keith,
I was interviewed for the article. I too thought it was just okay. I was going to try to send it to you and Deb, but I forgot, I’m sorry. Even though the article was just okay, I was very impressed that the reporter wanted to interview me about the panel. Truth be told, I was a little nervous about how the article would be written because sometimes the reporters do misconstrue things. I hope you are doing well, I enjoyed working with you on the panel.
Katie Miller
You did very well, Katie. In my experience, it’s just about inevitable that a reporter will be confused by a story of any complexity–which is certainly the case here. Thanks for overcoming your reluctance to be interviewed. Far too often library stories go unreported because of people’s reluctance to speak with a reporter. I always offer to review what a reporter writes to avoid errors in a story, but it’s a rare reporter who takes me up on this offer.