u of pitts, take one

here's the essay as it stands now...what do you think?

yes it needs to be a lot shorter

5. University of Pittsburgh
statement of nor more than 500 words outlining your career goals
relevant experience in libraries, archives and/or information center sand other relevant work experience
relevant experience using information technology
goals: work in children’s services in a public library, become expert on children’s literature.
To say merely that information production and use has been revolutionized over my lifetime would be a gross understatement. The quantity of information available to anyone through the World Wide Web would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, as would the challenge of sorting through that information. Harnessing this capability to produce and access information is the challenge of the century, as is teaching children our children to do the same and thus ensuring their academic success.
A particularly important and sometimes neglected form of information is fiction. In an age when anything from a telephone number to baseball statistics are available within minutes from any computer, fiction allows us to step outside ourselves and examine what we are doing with all the knowledge we have, and why. We cannot afford to lose the truth available only through fiction. Children's fiction exerts this power on a population still becoming who they are, and who still have enough leisure time to explore this (at least outside dance lessons and soccer practice.) I still return to the books I read as a child to remember who I want to become. It is not necessary to explain here how great an impact education has on quality of life and, in the grand scheme of things, the advancement of a society. I am willing to accept the challenge of making our burgeoning information stores a real tool to be used for the next generations, so they are not left grabbing at any information source they may find for their term paper or senate report. Through my contact with the Cleveland Public Library system, my work, research, I have kept abreast of my favorite children’s authors' work, and discovered more current work as well. These experiences, along with my academic and volunteer work as well, have lead me to seek expertise in knowledge and familiarity with the body of children's literature, and pointed me toward my goal of helping children harness information through the resources of the public library.
During my graduate studies at Case Western Reserve University, I discovered the Cleveland public libraries. Their children’s sections offered everything from reading nooks to windows looking out over waterfalls. I could never go anywhere without discovering a new branch. The millions of titles at my disposal throught the CLEVENET system dumbfounded me. The superior children's book on CD selection, over the legnthy car trips I made for clinical assignments and work, exposed me to much of the newer children's and young adults' literature. I discovered Kate di Camillo's Tale of Despereaux and Christopher Paul Curtis' Bud, Not Buddy. I also caught up on the books I had missed as a child, such as "The Chocolate Wars" by Robert Cormier, and The Diary of Anne Frank.
This contact with the library, in addition to supporting my own reading gand library use habits, supported my professional life . As a student speech language pathologist, I was expected to use children’s books in my therapy, and as often I was discouraged from returning to the old standards by supervisors who had already read and re-read them to clients. I spent many hours in children’s sections of public libraries, consulting children’s librarians on books on a number of topics.
I also spent a summer working at a day care in order to support myself during my studies. Around the same time, as I was researching options for crafts and activities for a diverse group of six to ten year olds, I stumbled across a book one of my professors had recommended to me earlier: The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. The research and stories illustrating how important reading, and especially reading aloud, is for children shocked, captivated, and challenged me. It supported much of what I had learned through my coursework about child language development as it relates to academic sucess. More importantly, it provided practical solutions for current academic dillemmas, and pointed to the public library as the heart of those solutions.
The librarian who visited my daycare each week to read aloud and present prizes to the children for their reading kept their charts, as well as the books she brought them, in another room, where the children could not see them and could rarely access them. Inspired by my reading, I extended her work our classroom. I had the children make their own charts, let them keep track of their own reading. I also had up to sixty books, magazines, and comic books checked out on my own card, which I selected with the help of the children’s librarians in our public libraries, available to them in our classroom. I selected books for reading aloud and experimented with storytelling techniques, even bringing in a guest reader. I was also careful to talk to the children and select books relating to their interests . I began to measure my sucess by how the children read and enjoyed reading. By the end of the summer, children who had shown no interest in books on their own were bringing them to me to read and requesting favorites from the library. While many still required prizes to pique their interest, and they never managed to sit still with a book as long as they did with their video games, I felt I had achieved something.
In addition to my work directly with children and books, I have been fortunate to able to combine academic research and reviews of children’s literature through my undergraduate senior honors thesis, in which I wrote a section of a children’s novel, having gathered quantitative and qualitiative information from books and journal articles on issues related to my plot. I alsoas wrote reviews of children’s books that had inspired my work.
My two years in graduate school for Speech Language Pathology also provided ample opportunity to explore information technology. Although we were required to take a course in research methods and had to complete many research projects, I was amazed that virtually none of my fellow students ever used the library, relying solely on online databases for their research. As such they were obliged to rely on secondary sources for a good deal of their information. Observing them, I began to realize just how much potential for mismanagement and misuse of information came with our immediate access to it. I found myself often more concerned about the sources, organization, and presentation of the information in our group projects than I was about the information itself, which might have been my first indication of my suitability for a career in information sciences. I knew how to find full text articles online, of course, but I also knew which databases to search for older articles, how to find those articles, and how to find the articles that supported those articles. It astonished me that people would limit themselves to what was immediately available online, shunning the short trip that would place information that more precisely suited to their needs at their fingertips.
I have also had the opportunity to explore smaller, more specialized collections. I worked as a volunteer, cataloguing new items in a small media center belonging to a local county board of mental retardation and developmental disabilities, providing educational resources for people with developmental disabilities, as well as for their parents and teachers. In addition to providing me with experience using World Cat and collections management software. My mentor introduced me to the main classification systems and also to her own for use with this particular collection. I plan to use my experience to develop a cataloguing system for a small library I have volunteered to organize belonging to a small religious student organition in Rouen, France.