Died 1963 | ||
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Books Story‑Telling Poems - Selected, MORE TALES FROM TH, STORY‑TELLING BALLADS, BK OF ELVES & FAIRIES, WONDER GARDEN NATURE Similar Milo Winter, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens | ||
Frances Jenkins Olcott (1872-1963) was the first head librarian of the children’s department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in 1898. She also wrote many children’s books and books for those in the profession of providing library service to children and youth.
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Early life
Frances Jenkins Olcott was born in 1872 in Paris, France near the Garden of the Batignolles. She later lived in Albany, New York at both her parents’ and grandmother’s houses; this was followed by years in the country suburbs of Albany where she was tutored by her parents who provided her with a formative education.
Her father, Franklin Olcott, born in America, but educated in Göttingen and Würzburg in German, worked in the American Consular Service. He tutored her in German and the classics . Her mother, Julia Olcott, translated children’s stories from French. According to Olcott, her father’s strong vocabulary, love for poetry, and researcher’s mind and her mother's fine critical powers, delicate feelings for words, and eager mind, helped to develop her intellectual skills and analytical abilities and had a strong influence on her writing. Olcott mentions the importance that her religious influences as a child had upon her writing as well. Her grandmother’s formal and dignified religious influence was present alongside her parents’ Bible readings and daily prayers.
She earned her high school certificate through regents’ examinations before taking entrance examinations for the New York State Library School where she graduated in 1896.
Librarian
Olcott was an assistant librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library from 1897–1898. She them became the first librarian to develop and head the Children’s Department at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and to organize a formal training program known as The Training School for Children’s Librarians. Her children’s department was a laboratory where she and her staff tested methods, evolved standards, and worked out problems regarding reading engagement, content selection, and material organization. Her team’s results were published and shared with other libraries and schools; her educationally minded staff with two expert bibliographers helped eventually create what became her Carnegie-supported Training School for Children’s Librarians.
Olcott started outreach programs to bring books into homes, schools, detention centers, and beyond. Her efforts helped a large immigrant population at the time learn how to adapt to a new country. She promoted the idea of having home libraries for children, and she and her colleagues would set up a reading hour where groups of children would meet in a home in the community to be read to by the librarians.
Author
In 1911, Frances Jenkins Olcott left both Pittsburgh and her position of librarian and moved back to New York to write books for children, and books on how to be an effective children’s librarian. She wrote and edited more than twenty-four volumes which sold in her lifetime for more than a half million dollars.
She was asked to write the section on “Library Works with Children” for ALA’s 1914 Manual of Library Economy.