National Geographic Issues Redux

A quick update on the NatGeo preservation situation!

I reached out to the librarians around the diocese to ask if they have dealt with a similar situation. The response was overwhelmingly that the other school libraries in the area kept subscriptions to online issues but did not keep paper copies in most cases; three out of four of them didn't get NatGeo in paper form at all. It was suggested that we might want to dispense with our paper subscription, which I agree would definitely be the easiest option, but since the principal has asked to find a way to preserve this collection, no dice.

The librarian over at the Our Lady of Grace school in Greensboro suggested that in previous libraries she'd worked, periodical collections were preserved in magazine binders:

This would be a work-intensive option and would also involve a pretty hefty financial investment (Demco quotes $16.49 per binder, but I haven't done any thorough research on it yet), but it would definitely help the older issues stay preserved and more easily readable without being damaged. I'm not super optimistic that the school's budget will be put in that direction, though.

Beyond that, I'll have to keep trying to figure out what else we could do. Well, at least I have some options to present!

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.

The Great Reference Flood

Oh, man. They say that a practicum is going to be full of unexpected challenges, and that's pretty much the point of it, but you don't really expect curveballs this size. The reference section flooded this week! Let's learn about water damage and preservation on the fly, shall we?

When I came in to work at the beginning of the week, I noticed (sadly not right away) an odd discoloration of the carpet over in one corner of the library, where the fiction section ends and the reference section, specifically the part with the atlases and historical volumes, begins. I went over to peer at it, wasn't sure what it was, and eventually ended up touching it and realizing it was a splotch of damp. The kind that is apparently already spread in a two-yard radius, and that causes liquid to bubble up when you press down on it. Uh-oh.

A quick survey of the surrounding area showed that there didn't seem to be any water coming down from the ceiling or through the wall (or if there was, it was behind the shelves where I couldn't see it), which meant it was likely to be coming from the floor. Double uh-oh; just what everyone loves to see, possible structural integrity problems. The principal was not excited to find out about this at 8:00 a.m. on a school day, but random flooding waits for no man.

Since several hundred pounds of delicate reference books is not a great thing to have resting on top of a soggy, possibly unsound leak somewhere in the building infrastructure, I spent most of the morning moving things off the shelves and onto tables across the room, moving the expensive free-standing SmartBoard that was parked in the same area, and setting up shoestring cordons to keep students out of the area. The reshelving process will not be an exciting one, but I'd rather reshelve the whole section than have to throw some of it away or pick any of it out of a damaged floor.

Which totally sounds like an overdramatic worry, except that about an hour later the ceiling collapsed in the music room directly under that part of the library, where the flood had now spread to about four yards of carpet and literal standing water in the lowest part of it. Luckily, the library floor didn't go with it, but it was a dramatic morning for everyone. Around this time we found the source of the problem: the sink in a nearby janitorial closet had apparently accidentally been left running since the previous afternoon while no one was there, which was briefly blamed on youthful hijinks from the middle school students before being confirmed to be a staff mistake.

So, the good news: it wasn't a leak in the sense of a damaged pipe or anything! But the bad news: there's still water everywhere. I'm not sure what the plan is for the music room ceiling downstairs (good luck to them - I was a music major in singing back in the day and a ceiling/damp problem is the worst possible thing), but we've set up a portable dehumidifier and several box fans around the area, and are hoping that the wood damage to the shelves won't be too bad. It looks like it never got deep enough to do much more than discolor the wood, and the carpet - assuming we can get the parts of it under the shelves to dry, which I'm a little worried about - should return to normal if we can dry it out faster than mildew can set in. So it looks like a few days of monitoring the situation and hoping for the best.

If there is insurmountable damage, which I sincerely hope there is not, we'll have to divert some budgeting away from acquisitions to try to manage the situation, but one step at a time. For now, the plan is to keep kids out of the squishy part of the library and figure out how to keep the reference volumes intact!

Student Suggestions in a School Library

I've always been a big fan of suggestion boxes and feedback options in libraries, so when I started here at St. Leo and there wasn't one, I figured, let's get that started! I pulled one together about a week ago and installed it up next to the circulation deck: just a small open wooden box, a stack of paper and pencils, and a sign asking for suggestions for books that students would like to see added to the collection, or library activities they (or faculty!) might enjoy.

It's been slow going at first. I had to explain to a LOT of students what the box was for, even after they read the sign, and furthermore they really weren't sure what the point of it was even then. Explaining that the library would try to purchase some of the books they liked helped some of them get the idea and enthusiastically add their requests, but others - usually the older kids, who were aware that the school didn't frequently get new materials in - still seemed skeptical that there was any point.

It's actually been a pretty fun time to help the younger grade students add suggestions; often, they know what they want, but aren't sure what it's called or how to write it down. I've been getting a good number of suggestions in the neighborhood of "more cooking books" or "pictures of horses" as well as specific titles or authors, but that's a nice barometer of what the kids like to read, especially at different grade levels.

Since purchasing is pretty infrequent, I've just been collecting the suggestions for now, which has also led to some conversations with students about why the item they asked for in it last week hasn't yet magically appeared, but we're slowly getting the whole process figured out as a school and set of patrons. In the meantime, at least I definitely know about some very in-demand series that, if I ever get that purchasing budget, would go over spectacularly!

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!