[LM_NET] GEN: NYC school libraries get makeovers

[Josephine Dervan <dervan@OPTONLINE.NET>]

from today's NY Times:
 
Public School 47 in the Soundview section of the Bronx, a Gothic-inflected pile of 
a building with a stone owl watching over its main door, is so crowded that almost 
every inch inside must be used. The gym has been carved into classrooms, lavatories 
have been turned into assistant principals’ offices, and the old phone booth 
survives only until someone can figure out what to do with it.
 
But at the top of the school’s main staircases on the second floor, a new set of 
doors leads students into a room that somehow seems to keep expanding, like a place 
out of Harry Potter or Winsor McKay’s comic strips. 
Perhaps even stranger than the display is the fact that the room, a sparkling new 
7,000-book library recently completed for the school with the help of the Robin 
Hood Foundation, is the first proper library the school has had in years.
“A lot of students here have never been in a school library or even a public 
library,” said Joanne Davis, a P.S. 47 teacher who has been retrained with the 
foundation’s help to become the school’s librarian.
Over the last nine years the foundation, dedicated to fighting poverty in New York 
City, and the city’s schools administration have built, with the help of private 
donors, libraries in 62 schools in low-income neighborhoods. Some of the libraries, 
including those recently completely at three schools in the Bronx, have also come 
with grand, permanent works by well-known artists and illustrators that bring to 
mind the murals of the Works Progress Administration — or, in the case of P.S. 47’s 
alphabetic conglomeration, created by the illustrator 
Maira Kalman, a kind of unhinged American Museum of Natural History.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/arts/design/14mura.html?th&emc=th


Josephine Dervan, MLS -Adjunct Instructor 
School of Communication, Information and Library Studies 
Rutgers University 
dervan at optonline.net 


He who has a library and a garden, wants for nothing- Cicero 

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