Allison Kaplan Receives Bechtel Fellowship

ALA's Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) has awarded two 2011 Louise Seaman Bechtel Fellowships to Allison Kaplan, faculty associate at the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies, and Victoria Penny, First Regional Library in Hernando, Mississippi.

The fellowship will enable Kaplan to pursue her study, "Board Books: From Toy to Literacy Tool" at the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, a part of the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida, Gainesville. The Baldwin Library contains a special collection of 85,000 volumes of children's literature published mostly before 1950. The fellowship is endowed in memory of Louise Seaman Bechtel and and Ruth M. Baldwin and provides a stipend of $4,000.  also received a Bechtel Fellowship.

Kaplan says, "By exploring the collection of toy and board books in the Baldwin Library, I hope to be able to better understand what led to the evolution of the board book from a simple toy to an important part of the literacy process."

Kaplan is a WLA board member representing the Wisconsin Educational Media & Technology Association (WEMTA). She is also a member of the Library Development & Legislation Committee (LD&L).