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!