Updating an Outdated Media Collection (Or Trying To, Anyway)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although their numbers are dwindling as they slowly die and the school is understandably reluctant to replace such outdated pieces of technology.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.