Greetings,
   While we as a community are still focused on education issues for the 
high school grad, community college student, undergrad, and masters and 
iSchool and doc students, I wish to push those issues to the background 
for a few months and focus our attention on information services for the 
homebound.  As the population of our country ages, these information 
services will become more important to not only the twenty-somethings who 
have a broken leg, but for those of us who just get older.
    I call your attention to

http://www.ntxlibpartners.org/homebound

which is a Texas library consortium which has the best statement and set 
of policies of information services (they call it library services) for 
the homebound that I have seen.  This is far broader than the PL policy 
than I am living under (a few novels which the library selects) and 
includes videos and ILLs. and other materials.

    The toolkit itself rather sucks, in that it in itself does not note 
clearly where it is coming from or who is responsible for it. Other than 
that, it is a nice piece of policy and procedure.  And far better than 
other public library services to attend to this population.

     For next year (2013) for jESSE I'd like to focus on a single issue 
following the Kellogg plan of some years back, for Jan -Feb. This Kellogg 
program focused our attention on a single topic for a few weeks at a time, 
intensively. Let's try this again.

     _Information Services for the Homebound_  is the topic, and is not 
limited to public libraries but includes academic, special, iSchools, and 
the full range of the educational community from high school grads to 
doctoral students in LIS education and iSchool education.

     What are you doing to serve this population?  What are you teaching 
about information resources and how to serve them?

     What services do you want when you have a hard time walking to the 
kitchen because your joints hurt, much less when the telephone doesn't 
work because your ears are stopped up?

      See you in January.  Happy holidays everyone.

       --gw

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Gretchen Whitney, PhD, Retired
School of Information Sciences
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA           [log in to unmask]
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
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