Gloves, facemask, printouts – time to weed

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Superseded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.

Getting back into the swing of things

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.

Blowing My Own Trumpet

I had my Five Minutes of Glory today, presenting my vision for my library to the Junior and ELC staff. I know all too well that teachers are a hard audience, but also that they respond well to bribery, so I decided to use a technique I have heard of from various wondrous TLs, that of the Love Your Library showbag.

With the help of Big W and Chickenfeed (ie $2 shop) I assembled a document wallet for each staff member, a book of stickers, and highlighter and some stickynotes, then added

  • Quick and Dirty Guide to the Premier’s Reading Challenge, + bookmark and poster
  • Local bookstore 15% discount bookmark
  • Andy Griffiths ‘Just Macbeth!’ tour flyer for yrs 5 & 6 teachers
  • Referencing Refresher
  • Bibliography examples and templates
  • Information Literacy stages using ICT (from ASLA, 2004)

The last two items were targeted by year group, so each teacher only got the level relevant to their group, while their staff refresher doc had the full whammy. My aim was to give the staff an overview of the range of services provided by the library – most of which they know, but a reminder with prezzies doesn’t hurt – and to bring information literacy issues to the forefront a little more. We’ve been having a bit of a push in the Middle School to give staff and students this information and resources, so now I’m targeting the Junior School.

The other topic was that of the school library webpage. I do not like it – I find it text-heavy, disorganised, counter-intuitive (hey, this sounds a lot like me and my office…!) and I’m sure that staff and students find it very hard to know where to look to find anything useful. I want to redesign it, within the framework of the intranet software, to provide library and information services to everyone in an accessible way. I explained to staff my thoughts on this, and external issues such as forthcoming software changes to the catalogue search, and redesign of intranet appearance by contracted web developers later this year, and general lack of free time to do things instantly. I also asked staff would they like a more personalised library service – my library serves students from 4 to 14 yrs of age, an enormous range of skills, interests, literacy levels, subject areas. My thinking is to provide a page for each year group – or pair of years – based on a generic template, containing:

  • annotated links to age-appropriate search engines
  • research skills and tips (for students and parents working from home)
  • hotlists of pre-selected websites
  • links to in-house resources
  • links to support leisure reading – Book Week, PRC, author blogs…

I asked staff what they felt, and there were some easy questions and some curlier ones – but generally it felt like staff are ready to participate in changes that would improve their access to services and resources.

Having offered all this, now I have to make good on it. ::gulp::

:>

The latest issue of Connections

I’ve been a fan of the articles in Connections (from Curriculum Corporation) for a while now. They are generally pertinent, relevant and practical, and certainly provide plenty of inspiration.

Connections No. 69, Term 2 2009 has just crossed my desk, and the first article is Widgets and widgetry for librarians: copy, paste and relax. Sounds good to me! In fact, this article is very timely – we have a library webpage within our school intranet, and I have been thinking about how to revamp it to make it a more appealing and user-friendly access point for staff and students.

Some of the ideas this article has given me:

  • put the library timetable on the webpage – giving information on busy/not busy times, and also reinforcing the importance and role of the library without spelling it out
  • put student-created ppts on the webpage – the days of research project posters (hand coloured with pencil shavings) are over, so why not share some of students’ great products online?
  • add a del.icio.us feed/display
  • add a flickr badge – set it to ‘books’ or some such and watch it roll on

I’m also keeping in mind the KISS principle; my library serves years 3 to 8 and their teachers (and hopefully parents too), and I need to provide a site with a logical structure, clear navigation, self-explanatory graphics and not too much text.

I have some planning to do.

More conferring

the Transforming School Libraries e-conference is chugging right along, and I am enjoying skimming through the presentations to choose those most relevant to my situation, and then read/listen/view more carefully and follow the discussions. It has been fascinating to see the use -for instance- of Voicethread, because not only can you add typed or audio comments, but the comments play in order, and you can also ‘write’ on the image when commenting.

I am bringing the deputy head in on Thursday to give her an overview of what I am exploring, and to bounce ideas around regarding what we see the library providing to the school.

I’ll have to keep this brief, as there have been too many late nights and early mornings, and I do not wish to frighten small children tomorrow ;P

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