The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

TeachingLibrarian9.3 The Teaching Librarian Volume 9, no. 3 29 CSLA NATIONAL BOOK SERVICE AWARD Jo-Anne LaForty delivered this speech in Halifax to accept her award at the CLA conference in June. Iam indeed honoured to receive this award. I have felt like a celebrity the lastfew months. My principal announced this award to the school, had the entireschool read the press release, and on the cover of the school newsletter replaced her (principal's) photo with mine! I have been in the local newspaper and was spotlighted in the Roger's Cable news where they interviewed staff and students at the school. I have been honoured at a Toronto District School Board meeting and was given a gold watch (and I haven't even retired!). And just last week, one of the custodi- ans announced to the electrician who was repairing my cable television: "this teacher just won best teacher-librarian of Canada." This award has been an opportunity for the entire staff and student body to be proud and celebrate. Thank you to National Book Service for sponsoring this very prestigious award. Library programs are organic in nature. They are always evolving and depen- dent upon a complex interconnectedness among teacher-librarians, library staff, school culture, board support and the community. Teacher-librarians do not work in isolation; programs develop because of the collaboration of people. Therefore, my successes are due to the commitment and expertise of many teachers and teacher-librarians with whom I have had the pleasure to work. I may have been the catalyst but many others share in this award. I began as a teacher-librarian almost 25 years ago, fresh from the Faculty of Education where Larry Moore was my library professor. He introduced me to the concept of research skills, active learning and dynamic literacy programs... not to mention martinis! However, when I graduated, what I really wanted to do was to teach English. As fate would have it, my first position was in the library and I became a Head of Library in my first year as a teacher, in a rural school. To the surprise of the staff, I wanted to teach in the library. I've seen many changes in school libraries. When I began as a teacher-librarian, the focus of the library program was reading literacy, including book talks and author visits. This changed in the 1980s. I was at the coming out party of Partners in Action in 1982 and experienced the wave of excitement in its implementation throughout the '80s and the belief that the school library was the academic play- ground of the school, central to the school's curricular program. I embraced the computer revolution, learned new software and taught database searching, and only occasionally longed for the time when the only switch we turned off at the end of the day was the light. I was inspired by the Big Six model of research and then the Ontario four-stage process as outlined in Information Studies: Kindergarten to grade 12. Now in Ontario, a grade 10 literacy test that students must pass to gradu- ate from high school has balanced my library program. Now, along with teaching information literacy skills and technology, reading programs are again a priority.