PLA Blog

Browsing the trade show/exhibit hall today, I across a booth for a company that specializes in children’s books on deafness and deaf culture. I began signing (I learned American Sign Language in college) with one of the men at the booth, who told me he was the illustrator for the books, while the man behind the table was the author. These books are well written and beautifully illustrated, and really do speak to the issues of deafness and deaf culture in a way that children will understand.

After some discussion of where I learned sign language, and what I do for a living, the men told me that the booth across the way was staffed by Alice Hagemeyer, the first deaf librarian in the United States. They urged me to go introduce myself, and after some hesitation (my sign language is a bit rusty, and she’s a really important person), I did. Turns out, a proposal before ALA passed yesterday to urge the President Bush to declare March 13 through April 15 as National Deaf History Month, and Alice has been quite motivating force in making that happen.

Another librarian was there chatting with us, who had been an American Sign Language interpreter for 20 years before getting an MLS and becoming a librarian. Alice decided that she wanted to show us a book from Harvard University Press which was released last year titled Inside Deaf Culture. Unfortunately it wasn’t there, because it was a title from last season, but the booth representative took Alice’s postal address, and told her she would be sent a complimentary copy of the book.

Then Alice wanted to take us to the Greenwood Publishing Booth, because she is hoping that the publishing company will pick up her manuscript for a book on deafness and the history of deaf culture, and she’d like it to be published in conjunction with the first National Deaf History Month in 2006. She also wanted the publisher to meet me, her new hearing friend who is a librarian and a draftee/volunteer to help her promote the history month, and the other librarian, her new hearing friend who was so kind to help her by interpreting for her until she could find one of the ALA assigned interpreters.

The hope is that National Deaf History Month will raise awareness of deaf culture, deaf communities, and the library needs of deaf patrons, and Alice will have a booth at PLA 2006 to promote the cause, and I will be there to help. I’ll keep you posted here on the PLA Blog when the National Deaf History Month web site goes up.

Tags: ALA2005, conferences

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 1:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.