Library Programming for Adults with Developmental Disabilities

Carrie Banks has been the director of Brooklyn Public Library's (BPL) The Child's Place for Children with Special Needs since 1997. She serves on BPL's Children's Steering Committee and on the Universal Access Community of Interest, which is part of Association for Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA). She has been the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) representative to ASCLA and has chaired committees including the Service to Special Population Children and Their Caregivers committee of ALA's Children's Services Division and the Schneider Family Book Award committee. She has also served on the Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audio Production committee. She helped draft national guidelines for serving people with disabilities in public libraries. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the National Gardening Association and the Programming Committee for Music for Autism. Her articles have appeared in Children and Libraries, and she is the author of a chapter about The Child's Place for the book From Outreach to Equity (ALA Editions, 2004). She has conducted inclusion training for institutions including BPL, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the New York Aquarium, and America Reads and is a frequent presenter at ALA conferences, most recently in 2011. Before BPL, she worked at New York Public Library. Her extensive background in services for children with special needs has included working with children who have dyslexia, a history of abuse, pediatric psychiatric diagnoses, and craniofacial differences. In 2000, she received New York University's Samuel and May Rudin Award for Community Services for her work with the disability community. In 2010, she received the Sloan Public Service Award, and, in 2012, she was named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker.