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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