The CFC hits the books

by TALLEY HENNING BROWN

Story time has been reimagined. With money raised from a raffle held last winter, the Child and Family Center has revitalized and reorganized its collection of children’s books and established a dedicated reading area for the center’s 100-plus children. CFC staff welcomed children and parents to the new library at an open house celebration January 29.

By the book. Teacher Lindsay Ronning reads aloud from the CFC’s new collection.

Upgrading the library was begun by former CFC director Marjorie Goldsmith, who left Rockefeller University last year and was succeeded by Karen Booth. The old library’s few hundred books were largely unorganized and many were worn out and dated. Teachers had a hard time locating specific books they could use to support their curriculum and the lack of organization kept parents from using it as the lending library it was intended to be. During her last several months at Rockefeller, Dr. Goldsmith culled the collection, deciding what to keep and mapping out a new organizational scheme.

Last winter, the CFC Parents’ Association, whose past fundraising efforts have netted new indoor playground equipment, musical instruments and other purchases to enrich the educational experience, canvassed neighborhood businesses for donations of goods and services for the raffle they held in February, including a top prize of a trip to Miami Beach provided by a local travel agent. The raffle, together with a Valentine’s Day bake sale, raised nearly $8,000. “Many people gave who might not have known much about the CFC before,” says Karina Del Punta, research assistant professor with Rockefeller’s Gensat Project, former vice chair of the CFC Parents’ Association and mother of two. “We were surprised by the overwhelming response — everyone really got into the raffle.”

To catalogue the CFC’s growing stash of books — the library now has more than 1,400 titles — Dr. Goldsmith and Ms. Booth together chose LibraryThing, an online, open-access cataloguing system by which users can organize and cross-reference their books according to specific metadata as well as any number of thematic categories and subcategories. “Cataloguing was a huge collaborative project for the many parents who volunteered, from entering information into LibraryThing to tagging all the books for shelving,” says Catharine Boothroyd, a postdoctoral fellow in F. Nina Papavasiliou’s Laboratory of Lymphocyte Biology and mother of two boys in the CFC.

The new library, which shares a room with music and movement classes, is also outfitted with a child-sized couch and shelves and listening centers that the children can use to read along with audiobooks. A committee of parents is looking after the library’s upkeep.

“As a parent, I’m thrilled that literacy is such a big focus at the CFC,” says Dr. Boothroyd. “And with this new library, there is a diversity of books that I wouldn’t be able to provide at home.”