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Updated: June 5, 2025
In the Boston Public Library, storytelling is not organized as a definite feature of work with children, but has been employed occasionally in some branch libraries, regularly in others, by varying methods. It is regarded as markedly successful in districts where library assistants are closely identified with the work of the neighborhood.
The outline called First, for a statement of the extent to which storytelling is being carried on in playgrounds, public libraries, settlements, and such other institutions, exclusive of schools, as might come to the notice of the members of the committee.
No one who was present at those meetings of the New York Playground Congress, conducted by Miss Maud Summers, will ever forget her eloquent appeal for a full recognition of the value of storytelling as a definite activity of the playground. She saw its kinship to the folk dance and the folk song in the effort to preserve the traditions of his country to the foreign-born child.
The Cleveland Public Library publishes an illustrated "Handbook" containing a full account of its storytelling and club work. One playground has been opened in the Borough of Queens.
The professional storyteller has played a large part in the successful establishment of storytelling, and is destined to play a still larger part in the future development of the work in playgrounds and other institutions, by raising the standards of the playground library, or settlement worker, who is expected to tell stories.
Volunteer workers who have the ability to tell stories and who can so adapt themselves to their surroundings as to make their story hours effective, can do much for storytelling. This is especially true of men who have had actual experience of the life from which their stories are taken and can make these experiences of absorbing interest to their listeners.
There was one such in Tehran, a well-known cheerful old man, who looked as if he could, in quiet company, tell entertaining stones, for recitation is adopted by some of these wandering dervishes as a pleasant means of livelihood, and many of them in the storytelling art show considerable talent, cultivated taste, and retentive memory.
A candidate for a given position may be required to have storytelling ability, but no assistant should be required to tell stories as a part of her duties unless she can interest a group of children who have voluntarily come to listen to her stories. Repeating simplified versions of stories is not storytelling.
Still, since a beautiful writer was growing up in Salem, it is a pity that he should not have given himself a chance to commemorate some of the types that flourished in the richest soil of the place. Like almost all people who possess in a strong degree the storytelling faculty, Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh issues printed lists of the stories used and a pamphlet entitled "Storytelling a Public Library Method" by Miss Frances Jenkins Olcott, Chief of the Children's Department and Director of the Training School for Children's Librarians.
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