The library here has a very small selection of periodicals, split between educational/scientific periodicals for kids and religious publications geared more toward the graduating class and the adult teaching staff (with slightly more educational titles than religious ones). The school's current subscriptions, already active when I got here, are:
Cobblestone American History for Kids
Dig into History
National Geographic
National Geographic Kids
Ranger Rick Jr.
Sports Illustrated for Kids
Religious Periodicals:
Catechist
Catholic Digest
Guideposts
Inside the Vatican
Momentum
U.S. Catholic
The periodical collection doesn't circulate, which isn't super surprising since I think that's the case in a lot of smaller libraries... but its usage stats, even so, are abysmal. I can count the number of times I've seen a student actually pick one up on the fingers of a single hand, and the catalog's "used in library" feature doesn't add very many more. All student interest recorded has been in the educational magazines, mostly Nat Geo Kids and Sports Illustrated Kids, and so far this year nobody, including the faculty, has bothered to touch any of the religious publications except for me.
Since it's subscription renewal time for a lot of them, that leaves me looking at the situation and wondering what to do to improve it.
For reference, the students at the school each get a designated library time once during the week - 30 minutes for grades K through 5, 45 minutes for grades 6 through 8. Students can come in before or after school (and I have the library open from 7:30 a.m. every morning until 3:30 p.m. every afternoon for that purpose), but so far they really don't seem to do that unless they're just ducking in to return an overdue book they forgot to bring during their classtime. The library usage times they are given are expected to be structured, with lessons or readings for the majority of the time, so even those aren't really "free" browsing or reading time except for about 10 minutes or so at the end. Understandably, they usually use that time to find and check out reading material for the week, and don't waste much of it on actually reading anything in the library itself.
I think allowing the periodicals to circulate would probably result in them being read a little bit more, but the reasons against that, primarily that magazines are super easy for a child to totally destroy, are hard to solve. On the other hand, is that worse than them not being used at all? If they're not being read, there's not really much point in even having them!
Alternatively, I could try to find a way to make the periodicals be more directly involved in the kids' curriculum. Teachers haven't been using them, but I could still suggest to them that they do so as part of appropriate lessons, particularly science and history, or at least mention them to kids as potential research sources. My own classes that I'm supposed to "teach" (which I use loosely because I have no idea what I'm doing and the administration know that) have focused largely on research tools like online databases, encyclopedias, atlases and so on, but I could also spend a little time, particularly with the middle grades, on promoting the periodicals.
I'm hesitant, without the larger perspective of a few years of stsudent usage and faculty lesson needs, to cancel or mess with any of the subscriptions, even ones that seem to be totally ignored by the majority of users. I should probably look into the "used in library" stats for the religious publications in the system for the past few years? But I think a lot of those may be non-negotiable, considering the school's Catholic foundation, and the administration probably wants them there at least as much to be able to point out access to religious literature to potential parents as for any other reason.
Speaking of subscriptions and parent/teacher usage, I also discovered this week that the librarian has previously been the point of contact and subscription master for all classroom subscriptions, too - meaning that random teachers have been coming up to me all week asking about when they'll be getting their Scholastic magazine renewals! I'm playing catch-up on those, which mostly involves running around to different homerooms asking what they've used in the past and what they suspect they'll want in the future, and trying to get that all collected in one place for a call to our Scholastic rep. It's a little frustrating, considering that many of them are used to the process being handled by the previous librarian without their input, and they hadn't prepared anything because they'd forgotten about the change in employees. Oh, well. Such is life around a turnover.
I think I'm also going to work on an email blast to the entire faculty about periodical usage, to see if they have any input. Definitely worth having more information before messing with the subscription budget or breaking out the barcodes!
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