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.

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 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!