Bubbling Over

This weekend I sat down with the newest version of the CREW Weeding Manual, an excellent guide to the ins and outs of weeding a library collection. Since starting at this school I have rearranged the layout, done displays, bought new resources, played with technology, had a stocktake, but I have not done a comprehensive weeding. Some areas are crying out for attention (eg ten shelves of VHS off-air recordings, or the Teacher Reference shelves where extracting one tightly inserted title invites an avalanch), others aren’t too bad. I need to set myself a plan of attack, thus my reading matter as an instant refresher course.

Background info: the CREW method means Continuous Review and Evaluation – the idea being that you do not destroy your own sanity by attempting to weed an entire collection in one hit, but tackle it in pieces throughout the year. Ideally you would simply begin at 000 (the CREW method is based on the Dewey Decimal System) and keep going until you ran out of numbers at 999.9999. I am not going to do that this year – I really need to target areas of immediate importance and usefulness, so I will plan a full-year program based around incipient units of work. For instance, I know that Year 3 will be looking at Tasmania in Term 1, so an examination of the 994 sections (non-fiction, TR, posters and AV) in the next week will be useful in identifying MUSTIE resources and planning new purchases.

?MUSTIE? Yes, that’s right – MUSTIE is the second part of the method. When deciding whether a resource adds value to the library collection, we need to consider quality, accuracy, physical condition, authority, relevance, currency and so on. MUSTIE is a brilliant acronym for the main reasons to consider removing a resource:

Misleading

Ugly

Superseded

Trivial

Irrelevant

Elsewhere

The other factors that must be considered are age and popularity – anything too old or unpopular adds no value to the collection, so the CREW method includes suggested timeframes for these two factors for each non-fiction section: areas which undergo rapid development, eg digital technology, require more frequent review than classic fairytales for instance, and titles that have sat untouched on a shelf in the decade since they were purchased are unlikely to suddenly become popular in the next few years.

Planning this comprehensive review of an entire collection is a little daunting, but I’m hoping that I can allocate myself a lesson each week to tackle this task, and get through it in bite-sized pieces. I think that this is also going to turn out to be something of a collection mapping exercise – another technique that I need to review as I plan this out.

Last but not least, I am keeping as my compass points Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. A library is a growing organism.

2010 is here, and tomorrow we welcome the students back to school. We staff had a Professional Development week last week, full of meetings, policy updates, planning sessions, first aid training, excellent food, and lots of slightly befuddled expressions as people tried to remember where they put those books/files/illicit chocolate supplies last year.
For me there were some valuable discussions about technology directions, ways to coordinate library classes so as to support classroom projects, and lots of colleagues dropping in to grab boxes of resources as they set up their classrooms.
This year will see some more tweaking of library classes; Year 5 and 6 classes will again be a team-taught, integrated approach, Year 3 are looking for research skills lessons to support a class unit, and Year 2 will be coming to the Big Library for a full 50 minute lesson, so as to give them a better start on book and information skills. To give me the time to do that, Kinder library will be taken by the JS head, so I will put together a “Beginner’s Guide to Teaching Library for Littlies” to support that. The Deputy head will also be taking Preps for 25 minutes, mostly for sharing stories, while I do a separate information skills lesson – this will be an interesting arrangement, needing some coordination to keep things relevant.
I see some big benefits in these arrangements for spreading the understanding of what library time can add to children’s education.
* Firstly, everyone knows how very busy the head and deputy head are, so having them teach library lessons may increase the perceived value beyond that of relief time for classroom teachers.
* Secondly it will provide more opportunities for collaboration between executive and I, and hopefully class teachers too, around the topic of information skills.
* Thirdly I hope that through reading with the small ones every week, these teachers will recognise the importance of helping children discover the riches to be found in reading for pleasure, so that this valuable facet of education is not neglected in favour of more assessable skills. Boys often struggle to see the point of reading, but my hope is that those who have warm memories of sharing great stories as children will rediscover reading later on, even if they get a little distracted (eg by adolescence) along the way.
Right now I have a certain amount of planning to do, so enough of the chitchat.

Apologies for bad poetry! This little tool is giving me ideas…

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

Hmm, perhaps that title needs a little work…

What I love, though, is that last night I was idling on the internet when my Skype  pinged to tell me that my friend Mayu in Tokyo was saying hello – we chatted for half an hour or so about the weather, time differences, just catch-up kind of conversation. I changed the language settings on my computer and typed in Japanese – I am so out of practice! I took a photo of myself with the built-in camera and sent it to her – so many ways to communicate so easily! Text, language input modes, emoticons, file transfers… On Skype I have shared video conversations with my boss. I have used Skype to phone my Mum, and do video with typing on the side…  Applications like Skype make it so easy to connect with other people despite distance – there are so many ways I could use this with my colleagues and students, molding the tool to suit my purposes…

Also this week, I love that I can ask for friends around the world to have their classes answer an online survey, direct them to a wiki about the project, log in and check the changing accumulation of results, and demonstrate the power of real data collection and the meanings behind the statistics by projecting the results onto a screen for my class to discuss. I love that I can tweet this request to various people in my network and ask them to pass on the url. I love that I can connect so easily to like-minded teachers and teacher-librarians around the world, just by typing and clicking…

I wonder what’s under the rest of the iceberg?

Now that I’m in recovery mode, and have had a chance to refine my event planner checklist, I’ve been thinking about the benefit of these author visits – how would I justify them to the powers that be if my budget came under fierce scrutiny?

I have hosted three author visits this year, two of them purely serendipitous. The visit last term by Jeannette Rowe gave our prep boys a chance to hear about how books are made, to see someone drawing pictures in the familiar style of known books, to understand some of the motivation behind writing books, and to enjoy well-known stories in a new way.
The book tour visit by Andy Griffiths gave students new insight into how funny books can be, how such outrageous ideas are developed, and how text and pictures interact. The drama performance of a short excerpt from the latest book also demonstrated how readers can interact with a text to bring it to life in a new form.
And this week’s event brought together sport and reading – a great AFL player up there on stage talking about how his old school friend asked him to help write a book, and now there are seven in the series with number eight planned for next year. Although many audience questions concentrated on Gary’s sporting career, there were quite a few about the series, how long it takes to write the books, things like that.

What are the students getting out of these events? For me it means a lot of organising – crossing ‘i’s and dotting ‘t’s – such as coordinating changes to timetables, supervision, ordering more copies of the books…

But for my students – the ongoing interest in the books, the discussions about the event and what they enjoyed, the connections they make between books on the shelf and the creative efforts of the person who put the story onto the page – those are very powerful things.

That’s the point.

I have been a little preoccupied this week, because today we were hosting another book launch-ish event, and anything that wasn’t arranged before I went to Perth had to be organised in a searing hurry – audio, permission notes, MCs, book orders, etc etc… Add to all that some fairly busy teaching days, staff meetings, Web 2.0 courses and normal home commitments, and you get a TL with not a lot of spare brain room for idle bloggery.
However, I am pleased to say that our event today went off without any particular hitches – thanks to the enormous help of various staff members and the students in their classes, we had chairs, audio, and MCs, adoring fans had their books signed, more adoring fans had their photos taken with the authors, and I earned some serious brownie points for being the organiser. The students had a great time, the authors were really wonderful speakers, various books and posters were given away as trivia quiz prizes, the school got one of those really really big posters with a nice thank you signed on it – and we only disrupted two lessons and recess. I’d say that’s pretty spectacular, wouldn’t you?

I am back from Perth, Wa, where I attended the ASLA XXI National Conference.

What a fantastic event! So many stimulating ideas, engaging presenters and wonderfully inspiring colleagues!!

While I will be talking more about particular presentations and ideas as I sort out the masses of information in my notes, Twitter feed and overloaded brain cells, I’d like to start by pointing out the single most effective aspect of attending a conference like this:

The people you meet!

I’m playing with Flickr this afternoon, and have had some fun exploring, clicking on links and playing with tools

Do you like my Spell with Flickr creation?

And look what I found while clicking around the World map! Exactly the kind of thing I’d been dreaming up earlier this week: Palette, by Jakerome

(CC licenced for sharing)

I’ve been reading Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed today, and find myself clicking link after link, following through fascinating ideas and pertinent quotes…

It would be easy to spend the entire day doing this, letting my head fill with fireworks as each new idea lets off another multi-coloured explosion of exciting possibilities.

However, I have other tasks to do – housework, lesson plans, 23 Things tutorials to design, socks to knit… I’ll have to let what I’ve read so far satisfy me until I have time to tackle some more.

There are never enough minutes in the day to accommodate all of the ‘oughts’ and ‘want tos’ along with the ‘musts’.

Original image: ‘fireworks at Israel 60th Celebration‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11911266@N02/2499113028
by: Ziv Turner

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Before Picasso went completely abstract…

Me, with class