School Libraries, according to Sen. Jack Reed

Thank you for supporting libraries, Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed.

There's an incorrect notion that the librarian's role is simply to check books in and out. They're really educational leaders. If you have a good school librarian, then you've got somebody who can engage children in teaching them lifelong skills about research, about use of the Internet. If you've got a creative librarian, you can pull together all sorts of different topics into the fun exercises that kids enjoy. And this is done with professional development. The skills of library professionals are critical to the success of any school library. You go to the successful schools, particularly some of the private schools that are pointed to as models of success, and I would bet a lot of money that they have a very good library staff that's well trained, and kids spend a lot of time in the library.

I want to just take this as my go-to response whenever someone asks why libraries are necessary today. Well said, Mr. Reed.

Good school libraries are essential to learning. Now it's even more critical to learn how to make judgments about the quality of sources and resources. You can pretty much guarentee that anything is a school library is vetted carefully. When you go on the Internet, that's not the case. [Children] have to be be even more discerning now because there's not the kind of editing and selection that you found previously when I was a kid, when the shelves were stocked by professional librarians with authoritative books. It's a lot different now. There's this continued need - even more so today - to teach skills about where to find something and to evaluate what you've found. So this is truly lifelong learning.