Updating an Outdated Media Collection (Or Trying To, Anyway)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although their numbers are dwindling as they slowly die and the school is understandably reluctant to replace such outdated pieces of technology.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