The Maggie Bush Years
By Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow
2009 marks the end of an era at GSLIS. Professor Maggie Bush officially retires in June, after more than a quarter century at Simmons and decades before that as a youth services librarian. Bush never set out to become a teacher, but "she's influenced a library community coast to coast," says GSLIS adjunct professor Anita Silvey. At GSLIS, Bush leaves behind a thriving youth services program, one that now offers a dual degree in library science and children's literature (see sidebar). In retirement, Bush plans to volunteer, bake, go to the movies, and maybe even teach a little.
The first time GSLIS adjunct Linda Braun '81LS met professor Maggie Bush was at a Massachusetts Library Association conference about 20 years ago, where she watched Bush and a colleague discuss their desire to see youth services get what they deserve, like more recognition and funding. These weren't idle complaints. Several years before, in the early- to mid- '80s, library schools across the country were dropping children's and young adult classes as they began to focus more on the information science side of the profession, or simply wanted to downsize.
For a brief period, Simmons was one of those programs. "From the time GSLIS opened, they had people who were pretty well-known teaching youth services," says Bush. But in the early 1980s, when Braun was a student at GSLIS, enrollment began to shrink. (Braun remembers classes with four people in them.) When the sole youth services professor at Simmons left, the dean decided not to fill the position.
"There were many library directors in Massachusetts who were upset because there's always a demand for children's librarians," says Bush, who, after a short stint as a GSLIS professor in the late '70s, was then working as a librarian in Washington, D.C., and was vice president of the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) in the ALA. Bush and her ALA colleagues began fighting nationally for youth services programs in library schools and faculty positions in the field. As a result, Bush was asked to come back to GSLIS, where she has taught children's, young adult, and public librarianship for the past 25 years.
"I came back to hold the position of youth services open," she says. "It worked, and I'm still here. I saved and grew the program." In 2004, GSLIS brought on Pattee to help teach the expanded curriculum; in January, youth services specialist Melanie Kimball joined the school. Today, the program is renowned: it ranks in the top 10 in the country this year, according to the U.S. News & World Report, and its graduates are vocal in their communities.
"[Youth services librarians] are not very good at saying, ‘This is what I do every day. This is what difference I'm making to your child and the life of your community,'" says Braun, a library consultant and adjunct professor at GSLIS. "One of the things I always see is Maggie's students out there in the world, and you can tell that they've taken the idea to heart in that regard. In every class that Maggie's ever taught, she says, ‘You need to make sure you're heard.'"
Bush likes to say she has no academic credentials (because she doesn't have a Ph.D.), but she had more than 20 years of professional experience as a children's librarian, literature specialist, bibliographer, and consultant in a handful of states before returning to Simmons to teach in 1984. And she has continued to work tirelessly in the library community, sitting on boards and book awards committees, and writing reviews of children's books. "There's virtually nobody as good as Maggie in evaluating nonfiction for youth," says Anita Silvey, a children's literature expert and author who edited Bush's reviews at Horn Book magazine for 11 years. "She sets the very highest standards for what needs to be between the covers of a children's book."
One of Bush's biggest accomplishments came during the tumultuous '80s, when support for youth services was in jeopardy. She chaired a Massachusetts Library Association (MLA) committee to develop standards for children's and, eventually, young adult services in public libraries. (She later chaired a similar committee for ALA.) The standards define collection principles (such as having diverse and timely materials), access, space requirements, programming practices, and other responsibilities of librarians in the field. Bush saw them as political documents, tools libraries could use to say they need professionals with certain qualifications. The Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners endorsed and supported the standards, and within a few years, Bush was the president of the newly founded Youth Services Section of the MLA.
When Bush retires from Simmons later this year, she'll leave behind a profession that is in many ways vastly changed from the one she entered nearly half a century ago. In recent years, youth services at public libraries have expanded to include infants and toddlers.
Meanwhile, young adult librarians have become "very articulate and good at promoting the idea that their services are really important," and increasingly active in ALA, says Bush. And, of course, technology has revolutionized librarianship (see the Snapshot for Linda Braun's take on this). It wasn't so long ago, says GSLIS youth services professor Amy Pattee, that children's librarians were debating over whether it was appropriate to show films in the place where books are held sacred. Today, computers are often a library's main draw for teens.
Despite the changes, and though Bush has expanded the GSLIS curriculum in youth services from three to six classes, she says today's coursework isn't that different from what she found when she arrived. "In the kind of work you do and the responsibilities you have, some of the content changes, but the overall structure doesn't change very much," she says. "As a children's person, you still have to manage a department of a library, design and deliver programs, know materials, and build collections."
Bush says being a librarian is a lot of fun, but she has perhaps had her biggest influence in the classroom. And in the end, Bush's students will carry on her legacy.
"I took every class I could with Maggie," says Julie Roach '03LS, head of children's services at the Cambridge Public Library. "She taught me the true importance of children's rights, and she empowered me to fight for them. I haven't been a student at Simmons for many years, but she is still always readily available whenever I need help, advice or just someone to listen. She has done so much for libraries, librarians and children — Simmons has been so lucky to have her."