Pam is a qualified librarian and manages the Education Library Service in Islington, which is a school library and museum loan service. She has been a librarian all her working life and is passionately committed to finding strategies for encouraging young people's reading. She has written books and articles about school libraries and about reading in schools.
Pam also teaches courses on children's literature, mostly at London Metropolitan University and has an MA in this subject.
Pam is on the education advisory group for the Poetry Archive and for Franklin Watts publisher. She is also a member of the British Section of IBBY, the International Board of Books for Young People.
Pam has visited the Akili libraries three times to get to know the staff and the schools and to deliver training to the librarians. For her, the key point about the Akili Trust is that each of the libraries is properly staffed. She has seen so many good intentions misguided by the sending of books with no-one to manage or organise them when they reach the destination country. She believes that a library is not a library without someone to manage it on a day to day basis and promote reading.
She is keen to ensure that the Akili libraries are stocked with appropriate books of good quality and have plenty of Kiswahili books and books published in Africa. She wants the libraries to concentrate on their outreach functions and reader development and not get overwhelmed by cataloguing and other aspects of the work which are in the end only a means to an end.
The next challenge, as Pam sees it, is to ensure that we work to develop a reading culture at the same time as integrating the use of computers into the lives of our library users.
