The author believes her professional life can be divided into two parts--being a building-level school librarian and being retired, noting that few librarians she has met planned to enter the profession, and like them, she was an accidental librarian. Though trained to be a high school English teacher, she was offered a job after college as a…

Although school libraries have changed greatly since the publication of the first set of school library standards in 1920 (National Education Association and North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools 1920), each subsequent iteration of the standards has sought to define the next incarnation of a profession undergoing continual…

The number of linguistically and culturally diverse students has been rapidly increasing in the United States. English language learner (ELL) enrollment has increased more than 50 percent from 1995-1996 to 2005-2006, composing about 10 percent of the total number of Pre-K-12 enrollment. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that 40 percent of the…

In this article, the author discusses ways for librarians who are active in their profession on how to move up to the national level. She offers two choices for new librarians as well as for librarians who are in their mid-career on whether to pursue their dream of moving up to the national level and get involved or not. She stresses that it is…