American Library Association

From the viewpoint of a beginning librarian who is ten months into a promising career to that of a retired librarian more than ten years beyond a professional lifetime's involvement with library services to children is quite a distance. That decade has involved few contacts with libraries for me. Instead, I have been learning the pleasures and problems of volun-teerism, working with the Evanston Historical Society, the League of Women Voters and several conservation projects. This institute has been highly stimulating an opportunity to see old friends and to be-come acquainted with a cross-section of currently active children's librarians. Here, as in my children's services days, I find the personal contacts most rewarding. Because of my years away from library service, I expected the insti-tute to reveal changes in libraries and in services to children. However, I was quite unprepared for the extent of those changes. Let me take library provision of audiovisual materials as an example. In 1942 ALA published a book on educational films and libraries. 1 1 was involved in this activity as the ALA staff contact with the Visual Methods Committee, later called the Audio-Visual Committee. We had to search to find the few libraries whose programs were reported. ALA encouraged library involvement with films and recordings, but public library recognition of responsibility for these materials was slow in coming. Present-day librar-ians can scarcely imagine the lack of library interest in these materials then. School librarians were more reponsive because there was more 75