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The Complete Writing Guide to NIH Behavioral Science Grants provides simple and clear explanations into the reasons that some grants get funded, and a step-by-step guide to writing those grants. This volume is edited by Lawrence M. Scheier, President of LARS Research Institute, Inc., and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Washington Univeristy, and William L. Dewey, a Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the School of Medicine and former Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. In the excerpt below some grant writing essentials are explained.

There are a few tried and true methods that will help you learn scholarship along the way. People working at think tanks or nonprofit groups can hire outside consultants with extensive grant-writing expertise, using this as an avenue to model writing skills. Individuals residing at academic centers can seek consultation from faculty with well-funded laboratories regardless of their substantive focus (good writing is good writing whether in chemistry or in anthropology). (more…)

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Unfortunately, I'm a bit behind on my blog reading and just discovered this September 19th post from Kelly Fineman tonight which relates to an earlier post of mine on funding school libraries.

Congress is considering proposed legislation that will increase financing for school libraries and in many cases, improve or restore library programming in school districts across the country. The SKILLS Act (short for Strengthening Kids' Interest in Learning and Libraries -- clearly the acronym came first here) was sponsored by Senators Jack Reed (RI) and Thad Cochran (MI) and by Representatives Raul Grijalva (AZ) and Vernon Ehlers (MI). According to the tracking organizations, the bills (one in the House, one in the Senate) have been referred to committees.

In less than two weeks Congress will be voting on legislation that will:
1. Get much needed funding to school libraries.
2. Requires that every school in every school district of every state employs at least one state certified, highly qualified school library media specialist.
3. Provides monies for training and professional development for school library media specialists.

What does this mean?
1. It means more monies for schools to buy books and educational materials.
2. It means that young people will have access to more and better books because informed, knowledgeable librarians will be making book selections for their schools and will have more input and influence on trade and educational publishing for young people because they will have more purchasing power. (Many schools' libraries are run by parent volunteers and/or a teacher or other educational professional who may or may not have the skills and knowledge of a certified school librarian.)
3. It means that young people will have a knowledgeable librarian to teach them how to be informed consumers of information and critical thinkers.
4. It means that those wonderful people who are running school libraries who are not trained as professional librarians, will have access to professional develop monies to help them to get the professional training they need to help our kids.

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO DO?
1. Fax or email or call your congressional representatives in support of this legislation: the Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries (SKILLs) Act. If you are uncertain who your Senators are, or who your representatives is, you can find out at this website.
2. Copy and paste this into an email and send it to everyone you know, especially: friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues, editors, publishers, authors, illustrators, teachers, librarians, parents---everyone and everyone you know. Add your own short personal note and ask them to please contact their congressional representatives today by fax or email to support the SKILLs legislation. Encourage them to write a very few short words in support of this legislation. If you use a formula message it will not be taken as seriously as a more personalized fax or email.

Remember- Your voice and your vote do count---Your legislators keep actual tallies of fax, phone and email messages from their constituents on various issues, and it can influence the outcome of their vote!

eSchoolNews reports on a new first-of-its-kind survey conducted by the American Association of School Librarians. Sara Kelly Johns, AASL president and library media specialist for New York's Lake Placid Middle/Senior High School is quoted as saying, "There is a growing body of research that documents the effect of a strong school library program on student achievement, and we need the data on staffing, size and age of collections, and budgets spent on resources to get a picture of a strong program that makes a difference for students."

It's amazing to me that anyone would be startled by this news. The more access kids have to quality reading materials and good information sources, the better they learn. No duh! as my kids would say. It is not just an issue of quality and quantity, it is about attitude - are children in school to learn a finite number of facts to graduate or are they in school to learn how to become lifelong learners?

Okay, you have to start somewhere and it turns out that there has been no entity operating as a storehouse of information about school libraries across the country so AASL is shouldering this responsibility and the survey is just the first of many. Hats off to AASL. Perhaps sharing some of these results will help people understand the value of school libraries.

It's interesting to hear stories from across the country about which positions are considered "optional" in a school when they have to cut budgets. Many times the school librarian or media specialist is the first head on the chopping block. Some forward thinking states such as my own state of NC mandate a media specialist in every public school so it's not considered optional in any way.

The survey finds that most school libraries are wired up with sufficient numbers of computers. Where things get interesting is the chasm of library staffing and expenditures per student between well-funded libraries and not so well funded.

During the critical learning-to-read years in elementary schools, it seems that the average elementary school library is open five fewer hours per week than a comparable middle- or high-school library. High school librarians spent twice as much time collaborating with teachers than do elementary librarians. Although there is not enough data to declare it conclusively, it seems that reading scores tend to be higher in schools with full time librarians who work collaboratively with teachers and students.

"The average school library spends about $11 per student, per year. But there is a wide gap between the average per-pupil expenditure of school libraries serving fewer than 300 students ($15) and those serving 2,000 students or more (less than $8). " eSchoolNews

And the school libraries in the top 25%? You know the ones...well staffed, well equipped, lots of new books, always crowded, happy faces? They're spending $30-$50 per student. If we are truly serious about increasing literacy in this country, we need to take our money out of our wallets and out of the federal and state coffers and invest in our country's future through support of our public and school libraries.

Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2006-2007 Report is out today. I haven’t looked at it yet and was waiting for it to hit the website. The URL for the actual 6MB file is here

http://www.ala.org/ala/ors/publiclibraryfundingtechnologyaccessstudy/finalreport.pdf

If you bookmark the page the document is linked to it will appear as “ALA | 2006-2007 Report” on your bookmark list. While I continue to make the point that tech/web savviness is going to be an important part of being useful relevant libraries in the 21st century, we still put out documents intended to be widely disseminated in PDF format, not HTML This assures that it will be shallowly linked and quoted, if at all, and those links will be hard to track and learn from.

The one news article that I’ve read referring to this report — an AP wire article that I read in the Las Vegas Sun — “Despite Demand, Libraries Won’t Add PCs” is a weird mess of statistics and odd conclusions (won’t add PCs? how about can’t add PCs. Who did this study again? Oh right The Gates Foundation… gee I wonder what their solution to this involves, it better not be Vista. update: the geeky artist librarian agrees). It discusses how popular technology in libraries has become, but also what the limitations are that libraries are facing. The whole article is tailor-made to support a roll-out of the Gates Foundation’s next round of funding which I’m sure will nicely sew up all the loose ends that this article pinpoints.

Except for the fact that more computers means, or should mean, more staff and more space, neither of which get a lot of lip service from technology grantors who would rather give away last year’s software for a hefty tax writeoff. You’ll note that this article says that libraries are cutting staffing so they can afford more computers. I assume then that this is supposed to imply that getting more computers means more freed up money to hire staff. However, we all know, at least out here in rural noplace, that funding remains fixed as does space and what we could really use is an operating system that doesn’t need a 20MB security update every few weeks and a browser that isn’t out-of-the-box vulnerable to a huge range of exploits that leave our computers barely working. The good news is that we can get both of those things and we don’t have to wait for someone to loan us money to do it. Sorry for the slightly bitter tone, I’ll chime in with some more facts from this study once I’ve gotten a chance to read it.