Frances Henne and the development of school library standards

Library Trends, Spring, 2004 by Diane D. Kester, Plummer Alston Jones, Jr.

The 1969 Standards emphasized that school media specialists were expected to work with classroom teachers in the analysis of instructional needs, in the design of learning activities using existing and new technologies, and in the production of materials needed to support the classroom curriculum. The standards stressed the role of the media specialist in helping students develop competence in listening, viewing, and reading skills (Henne, 1969).

From 1969 and into the 1970s, Henne's thinking turned to more general issues related to school-public library relations. Recognizing that, despite the existence of the evolving standards process in which she had played so central a role, the availability of federal funding, and the completion of demonstration projects such as the Knapp project, most schools continued to have substandard media programs, Henne advocated cooperation with the state library agencies to supplement school libraries. She promoted the concept of library networks involving two or more types of libraries or media centers and advocated district media centers to serve several schools districts (Henne, 1969; Henne, 1972; Sullivan, 1990; AASL and AECT, 1998). As she prepared for retirement, she reflected in a series of articles on many of the issues to which she had been dedicated professionally in the course of her career: the need for the continual improvement of school libraries and the integration of school libraries into school instructional programs, the use of media, the need for research in the actual and potential use of nonprint materials in school libraries, and the need of research libraries to acquire the resources needed for research in children's literature (Henne, 1975a, 1975b, 1976).

HENNE'S LEGACY TO SCHOOL LIBRARIANSHIP

Frances Henne, much honored by her profession, died on December 21, 1985, in a nursing home in Greenfield, Massachusetts, as a result of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) (Currents, 1986; Frances E. Henne--Standard bearer, 1986). Although her physical voice was stilled, her influence on and contribution to the development of school library standards is indisputable as the process of standards development, to some extent shaped by all that she was writing during this period, continued from 1945 to 1960 to 1969 and beyond. In 1975, the year of her retirement, the AASL and the newly organized Association of Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), formerly the NEA's DAVI, again collaborated on the next set of standards for school libraries, Media Programs: District and School, which recognized the changing and expanding role of the school library media specialist. Henne's influence can still be seen in the national guidelines, Information Power: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs, published in 1988, three years after her death, and ten years later, in 1998 in Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning.

The fact that both sets of national guidelines were written jointly by the AASL and the AECT reflects the power of Henne's vision of the integration of print and nonprint materials into school library media programs. The primary focus of both sets of guidelines was the building-level library media specialist, who was responsible for the design and delivery of effective library media programs and for initiating the planning process. Both sets of guidelines emphasized the need for collaboration in the design and implementation of the school library media program that best matched the instructional needs of the school. Henne would be pleased to know that both sets of guidelines demonstrated that the role of the library media specialist and the services of the library media center program were to be viewed as dynamic, "changing and evolving in response to the societal, economic, and technological demands on education" (AASL & AECT, 1988, p. x).