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!