|
Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Effie Louise Power (1873-1969) represented the high standard of collaboration among children's librarians that characterized the entire development of youth services work. This article examines Power's role in U.S. library history as a practitioner, library and information science educator, national and regional professional leader, and author. Particular emphasis is given to Power's place in the network of children's librarians in the early twentieth century, her professional authority as the librarian selected by the American Library Association to write the first textbook for children's librarianship, and her success as one of the many librarians who have written and edited children's books, especially folktale collections for use in storytelling programs. Emerging most notably from this research is the discovery of how energetically, albeit quietly, Power influenced not only her contemporaries but also the next several generations of children's librarians who have followed in her professional footsteps.
The consciousness that none of us is working alone in her endeavor to bring worthwhile books to children should strengthen us. --Effie L. Power (1925b)
INTRODUCTION
In May 1920 Effie L. Power was at a crossroads. After six years as head of Children's Services at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, she had been offered two job opportunities, one as State Director of School Libraries for Pennsylvania and the other as a faculty member at Slippery Rock Normal School. She wrote a letter to Linda Eastman, Librarian (chief administrator) of the Cleveland Public Library (CPL) and long-time collegial friend, to ask her advice. (1) "What do you think about both, and particularly Slippery Rock which is a State Normal School which trains for all the towns around Pittsburgh?" (Unpublished letter from E. L. Power to L. Eastman, May 17, 1920. Effie L. Power personnel file, Cleveland Public Library Archives). Eastman responded immediately by telegram: "Have position for your consideration. See me before accepting another" (Unpublished telegram from L. Eastman to E. L. Power, May 18, 1920. Effie L. Power personnel file, Cleveland Public Library Archives). After meeting with Power and the Library Board on May 27, Eastman wrote to offer Power the position of head of the Children's Department at CPL. "I cannot tell you how sincerely glad I shall be to have you back with us where I have always felt that you belonged" (Unpublished letter from L. Eastman to E. L. Power, May 27, 1920. Effie L. Power personnel file, Cleveland Public Library Archives). Power responded: "My dear Miss Eastman, I feel that you have offered me the very nicest position imaginable. I also feel that I am going home. Could anything be better?" (Unpublished letter from E. L Power to Linda Eastman, June 1, 1920. Effie L. Power personnel file, Cleveland Public Library Archives).
Power was indeed "returning home" to the place where her career as a children's librarian had begun twenty-five years earlier, as one of the first librarians in the United States in a professional position devoted solely to work with children. At this time, the act of returning home had ironic connotations for Power as a successful professional woman in a female-intensive child welfare profession. On the one hand, home is the traditional domestic sphere assigned to all women, and children's libraries were viewed by many as providing a welcoming--and appropriately female-supervised--space that could be a figurative home to urban children living in cramped and substandard housing (in fact, early children's rooms were often designed to resemble middle-class living rooms so as to create a "homelike" atmosphere). On the other hand, returning home could also mean facing one's most exacting critics, particularly--as with Power--when returning as head administrator to a place where she had started out as a twenty-three-year-old library assistant. In this challenging context, being hired as head of Children's Work at CPL was a high accolade and testimonial to her professional success.
During the intervening twenty-five years, Power's highly successful career in public library youth services work had included positions of increasing administrative responsibility at CPL, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library, and St. Louis Public Library. By 1920 she had become an important figure in children's librarianship with a career as library educator concurrent with her duties as a practicing librarian and her activities with regional and national professional associations. In library history, Power serves as an example of children's librarians, past and present, who utilize their experience and knowledge to teach others both in the classroom and through articles and books of lasting impact on the profession. She also represents the many children's librarians who contribute to children's literature in distinctively creative ways.
Power was one of the "first generation" of children's librarians, a group of women whose chief responsibility was children's work and who created their profession from the ground up. (2) They received general training in library work at one of the established library schools or through on-the-job apprentice programs but did not have any formalized training or courses in work with children because none as yet existed. They taught themselves how to evaluate materials for children, learned the most effective means of attracting children to books, and, in many cases, became children's authors themselves. Most importantly, they created a network of children's librarians across the country who learned from and supported one another and set the standard for the kind of collaboration that still exists today. They met at local, regional, and national professional meetings and corresponded regularly (Jenkins, 1996, pp. 815-818).
Although Power is but one of several important early figures in the history of children's librarianship, she is particularly noteworthy because, more than other innovators, she exemplifies the combination of practitioner and educator. She took what she learned in early training, combined it with her practical experience, and then formalized her knowledge by teaching other librarians in the classroom, on the job, and through her writings. In particular, the four anthologies of folktales for use by library storytellers embody the creativity with which youth services librarians approached library programming for young people. Never a singular figurehead like Anne Carroll Moore, who starred in the East Coast sector of children's librarianship, Power's equally effective leadership reflected the more typical collaborative ethic that came to distinguish the profession as a whole while also maintaining a high level of literacy activity.
POWER'S CAREER AS LIBRARIAN
Power began her career at the Cleveland Public Library in 1895, just three years after she graduated from Cleveland's Central High School. Although she had no professional training, she was put in charge of the juvenile alcove and worked "with such dedication that she was quite willing to serve without pay for seven months before she was put on the payroll at 12 cents an hour" (Cramer, 1972, p. 71). Although she was not given the title of Supervisor of Children's Work until 1903, she described herself as "nominally at the head of the children's work from '95 to the present [1903]" (Thomas, 1982, p. 129).
The lack of professional training in youth services librarianship was remedied in 1901, when the Training School for Children's Librarians opened at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library School. Power left CPL to enroll in Carnegie's training program and received her diploma in children's work in 1904. She obtained further training at Columbia University's Teachers College Summer School, where she received a teaching certificate in 1906.
Power's next major career move came in 1909 when she went to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library as First Assistant in the Children's Department. In 1911 she moved to St. Louis Public Library (SLPL) where she became Supervisor of Children's Work. At the time that Power was hired, the SLPL had just completed the process of building a network of branch libraries, each with its own children's room and children's librarian. SLPL head librarian Arthur Elmore Bostwick, formerly in charge of the Circulating Library at the New York Public Library (NYPL), wanted to coordinate the work of all the children's librarians across the system. To that end he hired Mary Douglas, formerly First Assistant at the NYPL Children's Department, but after a year she married and left her job. Organizing and centralizing the Children's Department required a librarian with experience in an urban library with a system of branches, and Power exactly fit the bill as a children's librarian with extensive experience in the large multibranched libraries of Cleveland and Pittsburgh. At SLPL she established a systematic storytelling program similar to that used at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, which included library story hours and book distribution at the municipal playgrounds. She held regular meetings at the Central Branch with all of the children's librarians to discuss important professional issues such as book evaluation. She also made regular visits to the branches to touch base with children's librarians and their staff.
As head of children's work at SLPL, Power authored her first significant article, a forty-nine-page report on work with children at her library entitled "How the Children of a Great City Get Their Books," which was published in the SLPL annual report for 1913/14 (Power 1914b). This report was then published as an illustrated pamphlet, which became one of the earliest manuals of children's librarianship and was widely promoted and distributed as an example of the work done by the library on behalf of children. Although specific to St. Louis, it details some of the ways that large urban public libraries provided outreach to their patrons. The text describes precisely the system of evaluation employed by children's librarians as they chose materials to add to the collection, as well as the various means by which the public library put books into the hands of St. Louis children. Power's informative text is lively and entertaining due in part to the photographs of groups of children at SLPL branches and on playgrounds. Her concluding paragraph demonstrates Power's commitment to youth services:
We count the issue of books with care, but that is not the measure of their use. Books are dead things unless they come into contact with living souls and are revivified. The most interesting stuff we work with in the Public Library is human nature and that is more vital when you catch it young. (Power, 1914b, p. 106)
Three years later, Power left St. Louis to return to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where she was supervisor of the Schools Division and later Head of the Children's Department. In 1920, as noted earlier, she returned to CPL as Head of the Children's Department, where she remained until her first retirement in 1937.
Power officially retired from CPL in 1937 but continued for another two years as professor at Columbia University's School of Library Service. In 1939 she moved to Pompano Beach, Florida, where she intended to spend time reading, resting, and writing "in a sunny, roomy home." Her retirement was of short duration. She became a member of the Board of the Pompano Beach Public Library and helped organize the reopening of the library, which had been destroyed by a series of hurricanes in the 1920s. In 1942, when the librarian resigned, she took over the job herself (Martin, 1948). At this time, she also returned to library education for a final time as author of the revised version of her textbook, now titled Work with Children in Public Libraries, which was published in 1943. Power retired for a second, final time in 1948. She later returned to her birthplace of Conneautville, Pennsylvania, where she lived until her death on October 8, 1969.
LIBRARY SERVICE TO ALL CHILDREN
It is significant that Power's career was situated in three large urban centers--Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis--with diverse ethnic and racial populations. Power, in accordance...
|
