By Trudy Simpson, Staff ReporterMONDAY, INTERNATIONAL School Library Day found Joan Hay with a small wish list.
Mrs. Hay, who works with the Jamaica Library Service's School Libraries' Network, highlighted two challenges facing the sector and hoped that remedies could be made and soon.
Schools have a problem recruiting librarians and teachers with a Library Studies background, she noted.
"These persons are usually specialists and people hardly ever recognise that, but school librarianship and information science is a very important and specialist discipline," she said.
The irony is that despite aid projects, a few schools still do not have accommodation for libraries.
She made her comments in an interview with The Gleaner against the background of Monday being observed as the Fourth International Day and this year the 50th anniversary of the school library in Jamaica.
Mrs. Hay suggested that some schools would not have had any form of library because if they accepted the common definition of a library, as a collection of books "then you will find that there are a few which have no accommodation," Mrs Hay explained.
She said some schools have books in boxes and "because their aims is to have the lending collection in the hands of the students they shouldn't have much of a problem but because the school library should cater to the reference function as well then you should have the ideal accommodation in every school library. Here the ideal is a centralised library to cater for a class at time and then there should be additional space for browsers."
However, those few schools do not have the facilities for the library and hence do not accept the books because they feel that the books will not be secured, she said.
"To support education, you ought to have school libraries. Every school should have a library. All categories of schools all equipped with libraries apart from a few which have not got the accommodation," she said.
She conceded that there have been projects to help such as the Government of Jamaica/Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) programme where 120 schools had their libraries developed.
She called for past students to help their almer maters' libraries, for more librarians and teachers who received training to come forward and volunteer at schools and appealed to the public to help the school libraries to keep information current.
"Many of our schools will do well with updated encyclopaedias. We also want the latest computers. When persons are giving gifts, we would be very pleased to receive the latest multimedia computers.
Also, many of our schools would need qualified librarians or qualified teacher-librarians. Therefore, we will appeal to the teachers who have actually pursued training in school librarianship or librarianship at the teacher training colleges to come forward and offer their services where schools have been trying to recruit qualified persons," Mrs Hay said.
International School Library Day was proclaimed by the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) President, Dr Blanche Woolls,in 1999. The first International School Library Day was celebrated on October 18, 1999, with the theme, "A Day in the Life...".
This year, the theme was "Library...Matters."
Mrs. Hay said that schools should have had activities such as book talks, story telling, exhibitions among other things for the day. All activities would be aimed at bringing to the fore, the wealth of knowledge contained in books and other audio visual material found in the school libraries.
