Semester Review: Practicum Thoughts

Now that the practicum period is winding to an end, along with the school year for my first-ever full-time librarian position, I'm thinking about the pros and cons and how it's all felt for me over the course of the year. A quick bulleted list might look something like this:

Pros:

• Excellent hours (school day only, out early)
• Small manageable collection (great for a first-time librarian)
• Hands-on experience in EVERYTHING (because there isn't anybody else to handle any of it!)
• Room to make decisions and take self-directed action (with administration support!)
• Great patrons (kids are for the most part great)

Cons:

• Constantly teaching classes all day (more on that below)
• Little direction when needed (expectation that librarian will "figure it out")
• Difficulty avoiding conflicts with curriculum (little communication from teachers)
• Un-library-related duties (Title I, etc.)
• Secret Expectations (more on that below, too)

I think I definitely can't overstate the value of working here as a learning opportunity; as a solo librarian position, it involved practically applying soooo many of the things I've done as coursework, from book preservation to intake of new materials to budgeting to marketing to website design to technology updates to wedding and soon inventory. Another practicum might have given me more specialized experience - for example, I'd have maybe gotten specialized archival experience in an archival position, or more direct customer service in a public library position - but this one gave me a kind of rounded do-it-all setup that will probably stand me in good stead no matter where I end up going. Not to mention that it was also in a school, which I didn't have any coursework pertaining to, so I gained some experience in things I wasn't even planning on!

There were definitely things I did not enjoy, though, which made it especially evident that a school library might not be for me (which is of course why I didn't study it in depth). For one thing, I've pretty much determined that I really, really don't like teaching - at least, not in a formal, teach three classes a day every day to every student in the school kind of a way. It's stressful and I often feel out of my depth, especially when there's so much pressure for certification and teaching standards that I don't have a lot of knowledge of. Teaching occasional classes, specifically on information literacy topics, that I could definitely manage - but constantly, day in and day out, with no support from the homeroom teachers (especially of note with younger grades that may need their teachers if something upsets or confuses them)? Would prefer not to be doing that.

Also, the Secret Expectations were a bit much. This is something that happens with any new job, I know: the old librarian did a lot of extra things and had a lot of extra duties that probably developed organically over her 20+ year tenure there, and that were not described as part of the librarian job description but that other faculty members expected to happen. These were things like filming religious services and creating archival versions for the parish, helping setup for school fundraiser races, chaperoning student events, running the morning announcements for the school, and so on. Maybe it was just the length of time the previous librarian had been there, or maybe it was something more common in schools, but the year has been a neverending process of discovering things that people wanted to know why I wasn't handling, and then scrambling to get them. Of course, if I stayed, less of a future problem!

It was definitely a positive experience overall, especially in terms of gaining knowledge and expanding experience.

Quick Website Update!

Exciting news! My practicum supervisor, over at the Our Lady of Mercy library, was excited to hear about my website project, and pointed out that they don't have a separate website for their library, either. We're talking about collaborating on website ideas and designs as I keep refining St. Leo's website, and maybe helping Our Lady get theirs off the ground, too!

We haven't discussed collaboration plans in depth yet, but Our Lady has some EBSCO subscriptions we don't that could use a central searching hub, and if we could find a way to get an online catalog working in addition to the on-site one they have, they'd increase student ability to look for information pretty substantially. Plus, it's always nice to show off the Media Center and give families a place to see what's going on.

Obviously, that's a long-range thing that might or might not ever happen, since I may not be staying at St. Leo forever, but it'd still be nice to keep connections with local librarians and lend a helping hand. Networking for beginners, right?

Sub-Collections in the Library: Organizational Issues

An interesting feature of this library is the presence of several loosely curated "sub-collections" within the collection, which apparently the previous librarian put together out of student interest. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell how these were chosen or based on what information, since there doesn't seem to be any evidence left lying around. I had to figure out what they were based on student questions and finding them in various shelves that didn't match the rest of the area, and am now pondering whether to move or change them as I go.

There are two general small collection types: series fiction, such as Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series or the popular Magic Tree House books, and themed collections, such as "any books about Star Wars" or "any books for grades 2-4 about fairies".

These seem like neat ideas on their own! But my problem with them is that they're super inconsistent, which made figuring out what and where they were difficult for me to start with, and makes using them for their intended purpose - students being able to find their subject/series of interest easily - harder than it should be. For example, all comic strips are collected in such a sub-collection - except, inexplicably, for some Peanuts volumes that remain shelved with the hardback fiction, even though some other Peanuts books are in that sub-collection. Even messier are split series, such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which sees its paperback editions separated as a sub-collection, but keeps its hardback editions in the normal fiction, so that students who go to one place or the other keep leaving because if the book they wanted was checked out, they have no idea we might have another copy.

Some of these collections are seeing pretty heavy use and definitely deserve to be displayed collected together for student ease; for example, the Star Wars section is frequented by kids from K through 4 all the time, and they would definitely have a harder time finding the many different authors and formats that contribute to that collection if they were dispersed throughout the library. But some of the series selected out definitely don't see any use, probably because they're older and have fallen out of interest in the meantime: the Mary-Kate and Ashley series, the late 80s/early 90s Gymnasts series, and so on. This suggests to me that the sub-collections haven't been updated in a long time, or that new materials that the library acquires are added to them where necessary, but old ones aren't actively curated or changed.

So: how to fix those, and when? Obviously the system could use some going over, not to mention clearer labeling and more advertising so kids can actually find the sub-collections they might be interested in. The principal has asked me to do an end-of-the-year inventory in the summer, so maybe at that point would be a good moment for assessment, especially since I'll be pulling usage stats anyway?

The Library Website: Working Toward a Better Tomorrow (Because Today Isn't There Yet)

I mentioned a while ago that the school's library no longer has a website - not even a basic portal where students could access the library's catalog. Obviously, this is no good for anyone who wants to use the library like a functioning information hub, not to mention that the school could really use a working library website for marketing purposes, so I've been working on an outline/sketch and now a mock-up in order to try to get something useful up and running.

Behold, a very unfinished beginning of a website!

It's still bare bones right now while I try to get content (or permission to write the content myself) from the administrators, but at least it links to the catalog and to our subscription to World Book Online, and has room to add specifics about what the students are doing right now and so forth. I'd like to also set up a citation hub, since learning to properly cite is such a big deal for the middle school students, and some connections to other community resources (public libraries, etc.) and online resources (WorldCat at least).

I used Wix to build the site; I did a few workshops with the diocese on Weebly, another WYSIWYG editor, but after testing both, I found Wix was a lot easier to navigate and use, and that Weebly didn't really have any tools that I preferred. I have built websites from scratch using HTML and CSS, but I'm not really a web designer or super fluent in things like Javascript, so in the interests of making sure the site is both attractive and useful, I decided to use third-party software.

The site's stuck on my Wix account address at the moment, but the school can pay to purchase a domain name for it, if they want to put that in the library's budget, or just link to it directly from the St. Leo school website and not bother with anyone visiting it directly. I do worry a bit about ease of transfer, since I may not be at this job forever and it would be good for the school to be able to easily transfer the site over the the new librarian to administer, so I created a separate Wix account from my personal one to make sure I could pass it on later.

As I'm looking over the year, I really wish I could have had a little more guidance from administration on this one; I seriously could not get anything out of them about what they wanted other than "the website should exist" and "I guess the catalog?" Oh, well... one of the issues of a tiny library in a tiny school!

National Geographic Issues Redux

A quick update on the NatGeo preservation situation!

I reached out to the librarians around the diocese to ask if they have dealt with a similar situation. The response was overwhelmingly that the other school libraries in the area kept subscriptions to online issues but did not keep paper copies in most cases; three out of four of them didn't get NatGeo in paper form at all. It was suggested that we might want to dispense with our paper subscription, which I agree would definitely be the easiest option, but since the principal has asked to find a way to preserve this collection, no dice.

The librarian over at the Our Lady of Grace school in Greensboro suggested that in previous libraries she'd worked, periodical collections were preserved in magazine binders:

This would be a work-intensive option and would also involve a pretty hefty financial investment (Demco quotes $16.49 per binder, but I haven't done any thorough research on it yet), but it would definitely help the older issues stay preserved and more easily readable without being damaged. I'm not super optimistic that the school's budget will be put in that direction, though.

Beyond that, I'll have to keep trying to figure out what else we could do. Well, at least I have some options to present!

National Geographic: Preserving Periodicals

Good news, first of all: the reference section carpeting has been saved! After a week of intensive drying, complete with students complaining about the noise and a constant stream of bloody noses from the dryness, it looks like the carpet dried out without too much damage. The wooden shelves are probably permanently stained at the bottom, but they seem to still be solid, and I don't detect any mold or mildew. I'll have to keep an eye on it in the future, but for now, it's time to start the process of reshelving the section and hoping to get things returned to running normally as soon as possible.

While spending so much time in the reference section, I've also been looking at our National Geographic collection, which is pretty darn all-encompassing. We have an almost uninterrupted set of issues dating back to 1956, only a few years after the school itself was founded, and while they've obviously been faithfully kept for a lot of years, they're not seeing any use. The past nine months or so of issues are kept in the periodicals section but don't see much use, just like the rest of the magazine subscriptions, but the rest of the collection is kept in reference - weirdly enough, on the very tippy-top of the shelves, where nobody can reach them and the majority of the students probably never even register they're there.


Obviously, this is not good for them as part of the collection - not only is no one using them, they're being collected in such a way as to guarantee that no one uses them, in which case I don't know why on earth we even pay for the subscription. If these are valuable to the school and to students - and I think they are, which is why NatGeo is such a staple for so many libraries! - then we need to find a way to make them accessible and useful.

A second problem became apparent when I had to remove a lot of the issues during the flooding scare; the top of a bookshelf, untouched for years, is not a great place to preserve delicate periodical issues. For many of these magazines, the pages have become cracked or yellowed, the spines have warped, the glue's become brittle and likely to lose pages, and there's dust pretty much everywhere dust could be. Yikes! So not only is the current storage solution for these useless to the library, it's also destroying the issues, again making it pretty moot to have them.

So, we're looking at two separate but related issues: how to encourage use of this collection in the library, and how to preserve and display it so that it isn't further damaged or destroyed by everyday wear.

Ideas for encouraging use:
Obviously, the first thing we'd have to do is bring the issues down out of the sky and put them somewhere they could actually be accessed by students. Unfortunately, space is at a premium in this very small library, so where could they go? It's possible some room could be freed up by weeding other old materials, especially in the more dated parts of the reference section, but moving them to just normal shelving probably isn't good enough to encourage student interest in them.

Ideally, we'd want to put together a display showcase of some kind to show off the kinds of things that are in these issues and how students could use them, and possibly relate it to a contest or game that gave kids a reason to get involved. That's pretty complex, though, so it'll take some thought.

Ideas for preserving the issues:
This area has me a little more out of my depth, though. Clearly a covered shelf would help with the dust, and a more firm shelving solution would help keep the issues pressed flat and less likely to warp and crack.

Honestly, some of these are of an age where I would be considering a digitization solution, but the library already has a subscription to NatGeo's archive of previous issues online, so digital copies of the issues would likely be redundant. The actual artifacts themselves are therefore more important for preservation, so I may have to do some research for useful techniques to help aging glues and pages.

It's also possible that maybe the library might decide not to keep these older volumes, and set a cutoff time when they get donated or pulped. Something else to bring up to the principal to hear her thoughts.

For this one, I'm sending out an email to the librarian supervisor over at Mercy to see if they have any particular way they handle their NatGeo collection, or at least any tips on display possibilities.

The Great Reference Flood

Oh, man. They say that a practicum is going to be full of unexpected challenges, and that's pretty much the point of it, but you don't really expect curveballs this size. The reference section flooded this week! Let's learn about water damage and preservation on the fly, shall we?

When I came in to work at the beginning of the week, I noticed (sadly not right away) an odd discoloration of the carpet over in one corner of the library, where the fiction section ends and the reference section, specifically the part with the atlases and historical volumes, begins. I went over to peer at it, wasn't sure what it was, and eventually ended up touching it and realizing it was a splotch of damp. The kind that is apparently already spread in a two-yard radius, and that causes liquid to bubble up when you press down on it. Uh-oh.

A quick survey of the surrounding area showed that there didn't seem to be any water coming down from the ceiling or through the wall (or if there was, it was behind the shelves where I couldn't see it), which meant it was likely to be coming from the floor. Double uh-oh; just what everyone loves to see, possible structural integrity problems. The principal was not excited to find out about this at 8:00 a.m. on a school day, but random flooding waits for no man.

Since several hundred pounds of delicate reference books is not a great thing to have resting on top of a soggy, possibly unsound leak somewhere in the building infrastructure, I spent most of the morning moving things off the shelves and onto tables across the room, moving the expensive free-standing SmartBoard that was parked in the same area, and setting up shoestring cordons to keep students out of the area. The reshelving process will not be an exciting one, but I'd rather reshelve the whole section than have to throw some of it away or pick any of it out of a damaged floor.

Which totally sounds like an overdramatic worry, except that about an hour later the ceiling collapsed in the music room directly under that part of the library, where the flood had now spread to about four yards of carpet and literal standing water in the lowest part of it. Luckily, the library floor didn't go with it, but it was a dramatic morning for everyone. Around this time we found the source of the problem: the sink in a nearby janitorial closet had apparently accidentally been left running since the previous afternoon while no one was there, which was briefly blamed on youthful hijinks from the middle school students before being confirmed to be a staff mistake.

So, the good news: it wasn't a leak in the sense of a damaged pipe or anything! But the bad news: there's still water everywhere. I'm not sure what the plan is for the music room ceiling downstairs (good luck to them - I was a music major in singing back in the day and a ceiling/damp problem is the worst possible thing), but we've set up a portable dehumidifier and several box fans around the area, and are hoping that the wood damage to the shelves won't be too bad. It looks like it never got deep enough to do much more than discolor the wood, and the carpet - assuming we can get the parts of it under the shelves to dry, which I'm a little worried about - should return to normal if we can dry it out faster than mildew can set in. So it looks like a few days of monitoring the situation and hoping for the best.

If there is insurmountable damage, which I sincerely hope there is not, we'll have to divert some budgeting away from acquisitions to try to manage the situation, but one step at a time. For now, the plan is to keep kids out of the squishy part of the library and figure out how to keep the reference volumes intact!