Today, after a long year of spectacular writing from a number of amazing articles submitted from around the country, we are proud to be announcing the winner of the Great Librarian Write-out!

Before we do though, I would like to take a second and talk about a couple of honorable mentions. The most wonderful Justin Hoenke made the comment that we should give the award to the Men-Of-The-Stacks calendar and I would like to say that I think this was an amazing project that made a good impact. It was fun, a little saucy, edgy, and definitely got the word out about an aspect of libraries. But I can’t do it because it was outside of the scope of the write-out. There were also many different articles written for academic journals on the value of libraries for research that were strongly considered. We even had a large number of blog posts on non-library blogs written that were amazing but were not in print as the contest requires (keep writing them though, they are awesome). In the end, we choose the one we did because it was well written, relevant, and a very lovely piece that was actually not-even written by a librarian!! In fact, the author is a senior at Lynbrook High School and plans a career in law after winning this most prestigious award of course!

So, without further commentary, I would like to present the winning article of the Great Librarian Write-out, $250.00 of my money, and a t-shirt of their choice from the Library Advocacy Store!

Published on April 18, 2011, San Jose Mercury News (CA)

OUR LOCAL LIBRARIES ARE A PLACE TO INSPIRE DREAMS
By Vikram Kanth from San Jose CA!!

When I was a kid, I had two dreams. One was to become a senator; the other was to be able to reach the top bookshelf at my local library. I used to be able to measure my growth based on the number of times that I needed to ask someone for help to reach a book. Although I am still quite a few years away from the first goal, I can now reach the highest bookshelf. Little did I realize then that the library would be integral to my personal growth. (continued on the San Jose Mercury Archive, you can also find it in its entirety here) towards the bottom of RCPL’s blog post.

If you didn’t make it in this year’s write-out, don’t worry! I’m putting up ANOTHER $250 for this year’s write-out to be announced next week.

This contest was a #makeithappen and #partyhard production from the ALA Think Tank and I’d like to especially thank JP Porcaro, Andrea Davis, Allen McGinley, John Chrastka, Jenn Wann, and Tiffany Mair for their support of this project. You guys are awesome.