GSLIS Student Award Recipients

Alice Lohrer Award for Literature and Library Services for Youth

Presented to April Spisak by Dr. Christine Jenkins at Convocation on May 12, 2002

This award, named in honor of M. Alice Lohrer, an alumna who served as a member of the faculty from 1941 to 1974. The Award is given annually to a student who shows outstanding promise in the field of literature and library services for youth.

This year's Alice Lohrer Award goes to April Spisak.

Youth services librarianship is more than 100 years old. From the beginning, textbooks aimed at future children's librarians enumerated the essential qualities for children's librarians. Among the qualities listed were: "Approachability, enthusiasm, resourcefulness, organizational ability, initiative, power of intellectual stimulation, intellectual alertness, cooperativeness, adaptability, sympathetic understanding of boys and girls, and wide knowledge of and enthusiasm for boys and girls literature." In addition to all this, she should possess that essential "positive problem-solving attitude" known as "the Library Spirit."

April is one of those happy individuals who appears to be interested in just about everything. This is a particularly important attribute for someone who is going into youth services librarianship--children and teens are indeed interested in just about everything, and truly superlative library service is the result of the librarian sharing that eclecticism.

For example, in my course in youth services librarianship, April (and her classmates Andrea Anderson and Elizabeth Staley) created an informative--and remarkably comprehensive-- website on library service to homeless teens. Later that semester, April went on to create a plan for facilitating change whereby public library outreach, resources, and services targeted and marketed to homeless and at-risk teens might become a reality.

Six months later, during her final summer at GSLIS she produced a remarkably ambitious independent study of historical and current series books for young readers. As her independent advisor, I witnessed the gusto with which she read and analyzed well over 100 books in dozens of juvenile series, ranging from the turn of the last century Motor Girls and Campfire Girlsto the current-turn of the century Junie B. Jones series.

Another of those early textbooks described the Library Spirit of the the ideal children's librarian: "She is going to be intimately associated for long hours with demanding, effervescent, and sometimes annoying youth. Can she take it without growing nervous and sharp-tongued? Will she be able to make a real place for herself, not alone through her book knowledge, but because of an outgoing personality free of sentimentality and shot through with a sense of humor and resiliency that laughs at or shakes off small misunderstandings and minor irritations as being too trivial to upset the library applecart."

In intellect, in temperament, and in spirit, April came to GSLIS already possessing the attributes of a successful children's librarian. Her teachers at GSLIS had the happy task of supplying the LIS content knowledge to a learner whose daily life appears to be perpetually full of teachable moments. The young people who April currently serves as youth services librarian are lucky to have her. So are her colleagues. And so were we here at GSLIS.

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