Library Lions 2009

Janice Moore-Smith

Janice Moore-Smith is a native New Yorker who was born in the Bronx and educated in New York City public schools. She became “hooked on libraries” when former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to her third-grade class and then punctuated her talk with the challenge, “If you don’t believe it, go look it up in the library!”

Growing up, Ms. Moore-Smith was a frequent patron of the Bronx’s Morrisania Library, which she thought was one of the most magnificent structures in her neighborhood and where she began to entertain the notion of “possibilities” and a future beyond her immediate surroundings. She briefly attended a college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, transferred to a college in Texas, and then went on to receive her undergraduate degree from Indiana University. She completed her graduate studies at North Carolina Central University.

Ms. Moore-Smith’s first job was as a page at NYPL’s Van Cortlandt Library, also in the Bronx. She vowed, at an early age, that her first and last job on earth would be working for The New York Public Library. She moved from her position as page to an adult education instructor, reading/educational consultant, college instructor, program administrator, and co-owner of a career development center. She became the Education Specialist/ Career Counselor at the Education Information Center at the Countee Cullen Library in Harlem in 1990 and transferred to the Career and Education Information Service at the Bronx Library Center the following year. Ms. Moore-Smith knew from her adventures in reading, observations of her environment, and what she believed to be the needs of others, that she was going to do work that would move people along through society. For the past 19 years, she has worked with a diverse population, from the Bronx and communities worldwide, to improve the quality of their lives.

“Were it not for my local library, I may not have ever realized that the world was full of choices rather than random chances….My motto is Choice not Chance.”