Literacy Committee and Literacy Assembly

I spent Friday afternoon attending the meeting of the ALA Committee on Literacy and Literacy Assembly. I had never attended a committee meeting at ALA before and Literacy is an issue that is an important one, not only in the library world but in life, so this seemed like a natural fit. This meeting, while a few hours, was probably one of the most informative and enjoyable sessions I have ever attended at an ALA conference. Not only was the committee very inviting to non-members sitting in with them, the members also engaged in terrific discussions, and also illuminated what the committee is doing to promote literacy. I have so many notes from the meeting that it is hard to do justice in this blog post, but I'll post the highlights:

• There should be more integration of the different types of literacy, including family literacy, adult literacy, digital literacy, and ESL literacy.
• The chair of the committee and others addressed the topic that literacy should be addressed at the library, that, in a sense, it is going back to our roots.
• The committee is presenting a program at this year’s conference, called Lifetime of Literacy, which addresses the importance of literacy skills from infancy to maturity
• There is a new task force on digital literacy. It was noted several times that digital literacy can only be obtained if someone obtains basic literacy skills.
• There is a new government site through an initiative from ALA, digitalliteracy.gov which highlights many resources for digital literacy training for trainers, librarians, and those trying to enhance their digital literacy skills.
• Petrice Sams-Abioudun, from the Lindy Boggs National Center for Community Literacy Loyola University gave an update regarding New Orleans and the role of literacy, especially post-Katrina. Some of her key points is that adult education has now moved to post-secondary, emphasis on the connection between literacy and the aftermath of disaster (in the wake of Hurrican Katrina and the BP Oil Spill), recovery of the library system. I’m also not doing Ms. Sams-Abioudun’s presentation justice. It was wonderful to listen to her.
• There are several toolkits for libraries on helping with literacy skills. A current one is entitled, “Keys to Engaging Older Adults @ your Library”. They are currently working on a toolkit about adult literacy. These are only some of the programs that this committee and the Office Literacy and Outreach Services (different from the Committee on Literacy) do.
• For more information: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/committees/ala/ala-literacy.cfm

Digitalliteracy.gov