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Home K-12 Part 1: How Can We Redefine the American Library?
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Julie Todaro Eleni Miltsakaki
2 minutes read

Part 1: How Can We Redefine the American Library?

ALA President-elect Julie Todaro returns to discuss the state of libraries nationwide and the roles they play in schools and communities.

Julie Todaro D.L.S., the American Library Association's President-elect, spent time with Dr. Berger to follow-up on their recent discussion regarding the state of libraries around the country and the role they play in schools and communities. 
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Julie Todaro D.L.S., the American Library Association’s President-elect, spent time with Dr. Berger to follow-up on their recent discussion regarding the state of libraries around the country and the role they play in schools and communities. 

 Todaro has been a library manager for over thirty years and has experience in all types of libraries and library settings. She is a Dean in a community college library, consults, presents workshops, and is an author and frequent presenter at association conferences and in organizational settings. Most recently, Todaro was co-chair of ALA President Barbara Stripling’s “Libraries From Now On” Invitational Summit at the Library of Congress, May 2014 and is the author of Library Management for the Digital Age: A New Paradigm (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) and Mentoring A to Z (Neal-Schuman, 2015).

Todaro is the recipient of distinctions and awards including the 1999 YWCA Austin Educator of the Year Award, the 1996 Librarian of the Year and 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Library Association.

Interview

Eleni Miltsakaki, Ph.D. founder of Choosito! and adjunct faculty member teaching educational technology at Penn Graduate School of Education joined Todaro to further discussion on the state of American libraries and how we can support librarians in their efforts to support students, teachers and communities.

Choosito! provides a set of web-based search tools, which make online research meaningful and useful to students. Choosito! Web filters typical searches in real time, using thematic and difficulty filters that adapt the results towards the abilities of the students and the needs of their research project. With Choosito!, teachers take charge of the web with control features that enable them to build their own Teachers’ Library, rate/block sites, and suggest new filters. Choosito’s Questbook builds a strong community of teachers who browse and contribute designs of research activities per grade and theme. For more information check out their video below:

Play video: Choosito! search and learn (2 minutes 3 seconds)
Choosito! search and learn2 min 3 sEleni on Vimeo

Check out more interviews examining the state of U.S. Libraries

America’s Library Girl 

Jennifer LaGarde

There is Nothing Little About the Power of Librarians 

Tiffany Whitehead a.k.a. The Mighty Little Librarian

Getting Kids to Love Literacy

Author Thomas Newkirk

More on K-12

  • Julie Todaro
    : Author
    President, American Library Association

    Dr. Julie Todaro President of the American Library Association, ALA has over 40 years of experience in academic, public, school, and special libraries and is a library manager, workshop presenter and consultant in both leadership and management with extensive experience in strategic planning; organizational design and effectiveness, and change; facilities design; mentorship; community partnerships; customer service; marketing and advocacy; facilitation; and, continuous learning. Todaro was the president of the Association of College and Research Libraries (2007-2008) and president of the Texas Library Association (2000-2001.) She was awarded the 2012 Texas Library Association (TLA) Lifetime Achievement Award; the Texas Library Association 1996 Librarian of the Year; and, the YWCA Austin Educator of the Year Award in 1999. Julie is the 2016-2017 President of the American Library Association and her presidential initiative further defines ALA’s “Libraries Transform” with “Libraries Transform: the Expert in the Library.” Todaro has worked for Austin Community College (ACC) since 1986 and has been Dean of Library Services since 2001. In this role, she manages eleven full-service campus libraries, center libraries and is responsible for operational and strategic planning, budgeting, and design of new and renovated libraries. ACC’s newest campuses were completed in 2013 and 2014 - Elgin (August 2013), Hays (January 2014) and Highland Mall (August 2014) and ACC Library Services are

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  • Eleni Miltsakaki
    : Author
    Founder & CEO, Choosito!

    Eleni Miltsakaki Founder & CEO of Choosito! and Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education. Eleni Miltsakaki is a computational linguist doing research in discourse and dialogue. She has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A., and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Essex, UK. She has studied extensively topic tracking and topic structure in discourse, reference and pronoun resolution in text and dialogue, discourse relations, and analysis of text readability with the purpose of matching text with the reader's reading comprehension ability. Methodological approaches: a) linguistic and corpus analyses of discourse, b) psycholinguistic experiments, and c) machine learning methods for classification and labeling tasks. She founded Choosito! an innovative research tool that uses linguistic analysis to filter websites by grade level and thematic content. Choosito! has been funded by NSF/SBIR.

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