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!

Student Suggestions in a School Library

I've always been a big fan of suggestion boxes and feedback options in libraries, so when I started here at St. Leo and there wasn't one, I figured, let's get that started! I pulled one together about a week ago and installed it up next to the circulation deck: just a small open wooden box, a stack of paper and pencils, and a sign asking for suggestions for books that students would like to see added to the collection, or library activities they (or faculty!) might enjoy.

It's been slow going at first. I had to explain to a LOT of students what the box was for, even after they read the sign, and furthermore they really weren't sure what the point of it was even then. Explaining that the library would try to purchase some of the books they liked helped some of them get the idea and enthusiastically add their requests, but others - usually the older kids, who were aware that the school didn't frequently get new materials in - still seemed skeptical that there was any point.

It's actually been a pretty fun time to help the younger grade students add suggestions; often, they know what they want, but aren't sure what it's called or how to write it down. I've been getting a good number of suggestions in the neighborhood of "more cooking books" or "pictures of horses" as well as specific titles or authors, but that's a nice barometer of what the kids like to read, especially at different grade levels.

Since purchasing is pretty infrequent, I've just been collecting the suggestions for now, which has also led to some conversations with students about why the item they asked for in it last week hasn't yet magically appeared, but we're slowly getting the whole process figured out as a school and set of patrons. In the meantime, at least I definitely know about some very in-demand series that, if I ever get that purchasing budget, would go over spectacularly!

Updating an Outdated Media Collection (Or Trying To, Anyway)

When I signed on here, the principal of the school mentioned specifically that they would love some help with the school's video materials collection, which she said was "a little bit dated". Sounds good, says I! I'm actually taking Digital Collections this semester as well, and looking at ways of collecting digital or digitizable media is what I'm up to right now anyway. Plus, kids' movies are fun!

Well, here's what the video materials collection looks like:

As you can see, the vast majority of it is on VHS, with a few DVDs for flavor from the past couple of years. I pretty much expected that, but it was still a little deflating to start digging through. So many materials on depreciated technology, oh my!

After a quick inventory, it looks like the school does still have a good number of active VCRs that are shared between classrooms, although their numbers are dwindling as they slowly die and the school is understandably reluctant to replace such outdated pieces of technology. There are only a few DVD players to be had, though - usually very old ones, often combo DVD/VHS players from the era when that was a big thing - so those classrooms that do want to use DVDs have to jockey for them anyway.

This was such a big project that I went back to the principal, as site supervisor, to ask exactly what she actually wanted, because "can you update this" is a pretty vague directive. After talking to her, she explained that the school would like an inventory of the video media holdings, after which it would be helpful to have a list of suggestions for which materials could or should be updated to DVD first, as well as which ones would be cost-effective. She also asked for an additional list of materials that maybe could be replaced with something new and better instead of just updated to new media storage, although I think I may want to go at this one step at a time and leave that until later.

This project looks like it might be too large for me to effectively complete within the practicum time period, but I can at least get a plan in place for it that someone else could keep working on. My tentative outline-of-an-outline, for the moment, is:

• Perform an inventory of the current VHS and DVD holdings for the library (using the catalogue as a starting point, but I'll still probably have to go through by hand to make sure that's accurate).
• Identify core materials - for example, the library's collection of Disney films, or the historical religious stories series - that the library definitely needs to keep, with input from the faculty about which materials are used most for lesson plans.
• Identify outdated or offensive materials - for example, a collection on Native American peoples with offensive terminology on the box as well as in its content - that could be updated to newer versions or options.
• Research pricing for DVD or digital-only file upgrades to identified materials.
• Research replacement materials for outdated/damaged materials.

I'm not sure how far I'll get on all that, at least without taking extra days outside of work to dig into it, but it's a start!

New Books on the Move!

A quick update on the new donated books! Here's the New Books display I ended up setting up in the front of the library:

These two shelves are almost always empty for displays anyway, so new books was a perfect opportunity to use them, and they're easily visible as you enter the library. The upper left shelf has the new chapter books for middle-grade kids, the upper right has the childrens' books, and the lower four are dedicated to the big Time-Life series we received. (I ended up not keeping most of the National Geographic photography books due to age and duplication of subject matter.)

After discussion with the faculty, in spite of the fanciness of these editions, I made the decision to have all of them except for the American Indians series be added to the regularly circulating collection. Because the kids only have time in the library for about ten to fifteen minutes per week, it seems unlikely that they'd actually read any of these historical series books during that time, so allowing them to circulate gives them a much higher chance of actually being used. (They'll get scuffed and bumped and scratched and bent... but not being read makes it basically pointless to have them in the first place, so those are risks that I'm willing to take, in spite of the brief sadness I keep experiencing at the idea of all that lovely worked leather being destroyed.)

So far, they've been a hit! The chapter and picture books have been moving pretty briskly, and there's been quite a bit of interest in the Mysteries of the Unknown series from the middle grades. The other series haven't seen as much interest, but I did see at least one kid who was looking for books on planes get very excited about the Epic of Flight series today.

The American Indians series is staying on reference status, because several faculty members expressed that they'd like to be able to use it for their units on Native American cultures, and either pull them as references for themselves or bring their classes to the library for designated study time using them.

Baby steps on adding to the collection, but it's something!

Adventures in Subscriptions

Since various teachers have been asking me about it, I'm dealing with periodical subscriptions this week!

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:

Educational Periodicals:

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!

The Library Website: How Did This Happen

So, in preparation for seeing what I could share with the library community at large, I checked out the library website recently. Or at least, I tried to, but I failed on account of there not being one. This came as a surprise, since the school website has a link on it that supposedly goes to the library website, and students had mentioned it before, but no dice.

After some investigation with the rest of the faculty, hampered by the fact that the previous librarian and computer teachers both left this summer and couldn't be reached, and the IT department is actually outsourced to a private company and thus not always available for consultation that doesn't cost a fee, i eventually discovered that the library did have a website, but that the school had recently migrated all its sites to a new domain, and apparently that one somehow didn't make it. Since the librarian had left, no one noticed that the site itself was also gone, which was not a welcome realization for the administration, let me tell you.

So, naturally, they asked me to go ahead and make a new one. No problem, obviously! All those digital library courses have to be good for something, right?

The library definitely needs a site, if for no other reason than to be an easy portal for the students who use it to get to the catalog (which they currently have no idea how to access unless I put in the direct link to the database for them, which is a pretty glaring flaw). It would also be a good marketing tool for the school, which as a private religious institution needs to try to attract families as much as possible and can always use more evidence of their useful services and resources.

I was hoping that I could start from some of the files or structure of the old site... but those are apparently all irreparably destroyed, having been removed and wiped from the old site's server as soon as the migration was complete. According to the old paperwork we were able to dig up, the site was designed and constructed by a third-party vendor anyway, so the previous librarian, even if I could get hold of her, would be unlikely to have any insight into it.

So that leaves me with quite the conundrum. What do I do here? How do I go about building this thing? The administration seems to prefer that I write something in pure HTML so that all files are available to be uploaded to the diocese's proprietary server, but hoo boy, I have not tried to write even a simple personal site in HTML in years, let alone something professional enough to work for an institution. I could work with a provider site - WordPress or Wix, or something similar - but while that would definitely be easier, it'd be hosted remotely and vulnerable to the hoster's decisions about its continuing existence, and might be aggravating in terms of ownership passage if I leave the library's employ.

I guess I'm going to go with making some lists of needed features and sketches of possible designs for now, and ponder on it.

Donations Ahoy: Managing Unexpected Additions to the Library

As a very (very) small library, St. Leo School isn't usually getting much in the way of a collection expansion. Since I've been here, I've pursued questions about budgeting and new acquisitions, and met with the general blank stares or uncomfortable silences that mean "we'd like to help you, bright-eyed new librarian, but we don't spend money on that." Which is understandable in a small parochial school, but still frustrating, especially since I've stepped into a sort of expectation that I come up with new material somewhere, yet not have any way to pay for it.

(For example, I learned last week that the previous librarian did do purchasing runs at Scholastic warehouse events, which sounded great to me! Not so great was the revelation that she just did these on her own, and then submitted expenses to the diocese to be reimbursed. Being a student, I don't have that kind of capital, plus I'm pretty sure the diocese doesn't move very quickly and I don't have three months to wait around on rent money!)

So, after some discussion of how else I'm supposed to get new material in here in response to student demand - Goodwill runs? Osmosis? I will provide, saith the LORD? - I reached the place where most small school and religious librarians probably live: the Donation Drumming-Up Doldrums. This is a joyless and uncomfortable place in which you try to harass people from the parish and school alumni to give you things for free, but also seem like this is a fun community event and they should be excited about it.

Probably later I'll write a whole blog post about the anti-excitement of the Give Me Stuff Please portion of this job, but in the meantime, here's a success story: today, someone responded, and boy in a big way!

All right, I'll admit, it feels good to have all THAT suddenly show up on my doorstep. This donation comes from a retired doctor who, while he never had children who attended this school, is still a member of the parish that runs it and decided that since he no longer uses some of the stodgier portions of his library, he'd be all right donating them. And also some of what he referred to as "kid junk", which turned out to be a small collection of actually rather nice Scholastic reference books and picture books for younger kids (which we are desperately in need of - the average date of publication of our childrens' picture-book materials is around 1970).

The nonfiction offerings are pretty fantastic, although they're also pretty dated (but then again, what in here isn't? I should take pictures of some of our geographical/historical collection for reference later). The biggest triumph is the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown collection, which is mostly focused on unexplained phenomena, psychic theories, and so forth; an odd choice for a religious school library, but I've recently had kids in the middle grades looking for books on those kinds of subjects, so it's a well-timed addition, and the series holds up very well in spite of its age.

The other selections are a little more hit-or-miss; there's definitely some interest in historical military business going on in this school, but I'm not sure we needed the full Time-Life Epic of Flight and The Seafarers lines. They're both gorgeous leather-bound sets in very nice condition, though, so if I can find room in ye olde tiny reference section, they'd probably be nice additions in spite of their age.

The historical volumes on the Old West and American History are the most likely to have to be examined for possibly not being processed and added to the collection; they're pretty old (1973 for the Time-Life Old West series) and, while in great condition and very prettily bound, look like they may have some historical inaccuracies or issues with terminology and historical descriptions that are no longer socially acceptable (particularly in regards to Native American peoples). This is one of those weird places where the library definitely needs new reference material, yet still might have to say, "No, I didn't mean that," when provided some. I may also want to go talk to the middle grade teachers to see if they'd be more useful as a classroom set, where an instructor can highlight the useful parts?

Finally, there are quite a few National Geographic volumes of natural landscapes and American vistas, which are also nice but getting less relevant as time distances them (for example, Back Roads America: A Portrait of Her People, published in 1980, is an interesting cultural artifact, but may not be super accurate in terms of current cultural trends).

After a quick run through Amazon average pricing, it looks like this donation is probably about $750-$850, which isn't bad for my first rodeo.

Once I'm done pre-weeding, space is going to be an issue, too. You can see a peek of an empty shelf behind that first picture, but that's the only one in the place, and I don't foresee a lot better luck with getting budgeting for new furniture than new materials. It might be worth it to go through the current reference section's antiquated geographic offerings to see if some of the new donations should be replacements rather than additions, but that's going to take a while with just me to do it!

Now to go learn about tax write-off language and letters of receipt, because I sense one coming in my future...

The St. Leo Parish School Library: Getting Started

All right, so here I am at the St. Leo Parish school library, starting a weird adventure.

For necessary background: I'm not a school library specialist, and in my time at UNCG I've taken exactly zero school-oriented library courses. I'm not on the licensure track, and I have no school background (I've never been a teacher or instructor of any kind, and my undergrad degree is in music performance). It's a little weird, therefore, that I'm here as the sole librarian for an elementary- and middle-school library, but life's weird that way. The principal of the school happens to be the mother of a very close friend of my husband's and mine (very close - she was at our wedding!), and she contacted me during the summer to ask if I'd be interested in working at St. Leo's, since her previous librarian, who had been there for 20+ years, had announced that she would soon retire.

And, well, when you're about to graduate from a library program and a full-time salaried librarian position falls into your lap, you don't say NO to it, so here I am. It was a little late to suddenly throw myself into pedagogy or school licensure programs, so I'm winging it and hoping to put the place together on the fly. (Luckily, the school is a parochial Catholic school, so it does not require state school licensure and I'm able to acquire religious licensure from the Diocese of Charlotte instead. Of course, I'm not Catholic, either, so it's still kind of weird, but c'est la vie!)

The school library is small, underfunded, and full of very aged material - about as you would expect for a small private school that doesn't get a lot of funding. It's charming and the students love it, too, though. Here's a quick tour of the materials and sections of the tiny two-room facilities.

This is the school's small fiction collection, which sees by far the most use from the middle grades on up (4th on up through 8th). The shelf to the right with the green sign is paperback fiction, and the shelf to the left with the orange sign is hardback. The collection is mostly pretty old - classic novels (Dickens, Alcott, Stevenson) and older fiction series like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. The newer books are easy to spot because they're for the most part destroyed - things like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series have only a few copies and are in pretty much constant circulation and demand.

Judging from the use of the upper shelves as display areas and the general age of the collection, it hasn't seen much expansion.

The childrens' section is the only part of the library to have its own room, which is also used as the storytelling/younger childrens' activity room. It's primarily picture books, with a small shelf of easy-reader introductory chapter books for kids making the transition into higher-grade materials, and very dated, with very few newer books and a giant slew of childrens' classics from the 1920s to 1960s making up most of its bulk. Some of these are good mainstays (Bemelmans' Madeline series, Dr. Seuss, etc.), while others are so old or incomprehensible to the kids that they don't even see them. Newer books in this part of the collection are primarily religious, including a large selection of picture books on Christian stories and Catholic schools.

Younger kids definitely like the toys that are related to their favorite books, but it's a challenge to keep them from going home with an opportunistic child now and then!

The nonfiction section is the largest potion of the library, and also sees the most traffic from younger-grade children (Kindergarten through 3rd), which probably says something about the childrens' section not meeting their needs as well as it should. It's heavy on biographies - almost a third of the nonfiction collection is devoted to them - and on the hard sciences, especially zoology and arts/crafts. It has a predictably pretty large portion dedicated to religious literature in the 200s, but is pretty light on most other areas, and unfortunately very dated in most of these portions. The history, geography, and social sciences volumes, in particular, are usually grounded somewhere in the 1980s or earlier, which is something of a concern for a school collection.

This teeny-tiny shelf section is the adult interest and professional section, which obviously isn't particularly extensive. It has a little bit of adult-oriented fiction - James Patterson and the like - and some professional manuals that are unfortunately old and might not be as useful for graduating students as one could wish. The Percy Jackson series here is really the only part of this sub-collection that sees much use, and I think it may only be over here because there wasn't enough room in the normal paperback fiction section.

The reference section is fairly large, but as you can see from the photos, it's not very up-to-date. The World Books there are three separate editions, with the newest from 2010 (although luckily the library does have a subscription to World Book Online to make up the difference!). Several Time-Life and National Geographic collections on historical events date to the 1970s, and unfortunately don't look like they've been updated recently or like anyone has really spent much time using them.

Dictionaries in a number of languages - mostly Spanish, French, Hebrew, and Chinese - are available, which is a nice touch (and likely because of the school's Catholic affiliation, which results in students from various different missionary countries).

This is the tiny periodicals section, which maintains about 13-15 active magazine subscriptions, including National Geographic (which you can see old editions of from back to the 1950s on top of shelves!) in both adult and kids' editions, Ranger Rick and Dig, and several religious publications, including U.S. Catholic and Catechist. Of all the sections in the library, the periodicals see the least use, which isn't surprising - they don't circulate and kids are usually only in the library during limited classtimes, and half the subscriptions are more for the faculty than for the students anyway.

Finally, the library does have a computer presence - a total of seventeen computers, ranging from 2002 for the oldest model to 2012 for the newest ones, most of them running Windows 7 but with several Windows XP holdouts. The library isn't meant to be the computer center for the school - there's a computer lab next door where the computer classes occur that has a larger and more up-to-date set of hardware - and doesn't have much budget devoted to it, and the computers are mostly used for educational java games or looking things up via the online World Book subscription.

Altogether, it's an aging collection that is trying to keep up for the students' sake with a very limited budget and not much real access for students. Under such constraints, it's not surprising that the library has always had a staff of only one - the librarian, now me! - and makes do with parent volunteers or student pages for any extra help it might need.

This is going to be a challenge, considering that there is literally no one else on-site to help out with the day-to-day running of the library; my practicum supervisor is Janice Safrit, head librarian at the nearby Our Lady of Mercy school library, so she'll be lending me her expertise and setting up meetings as necessary. Hopefully, she'll have a lot to share about the specifics of Catholic school library needs, and in the meantime, I'll have a lot to investigate on my own!