What is a teacher librarian to do? Buy digital resources which are accessible to students at home as well as at school, but at greatly increased prices – or stay the course and invest in permanent collection items that fill the shelves?
The boon of not committing to a hard, static version of an information source is that you can utilise the evolving content to maintain currency within a collection that meets the needs of the information consumers (Gildersleeves, 2018). More traditional formats of non-fiction books and reference materials have the added downside of maintenance of their physical conditions (Lamb and Johnson, 2012) , and as seen during COVID-19 when sanitising of materials was heavily promoted, this can take a heavy impact in a short period of time.
Budgets are finite within the school and allocating the meager budget to costly, ephemeral licenses to products that will never remain within the collection permanently is a significant consideration for teacher librarians. Library resources are often under utilised for a variety of reasons (Schools Catalogue Information Services, 2013 & Softlink, 2020) and therefore the role of the teacher librarian is to be efficient in deciphering what is needed, what can be afforded, and what meets the collection development policy of the school context.
Gildersleeves, L. (2018). 14 – The importance of service evaluation in libraries for children and schools. In C.Rankin & Brock, A. (Eds.), Challenges and opportunities in the digital age (pp. 207 – 220). Facet.
Lamb, A. & Johnson, H.L. (2012). Program administration: Budget management. The School Library Media Specialist. http://eduscapes.com/sms/administration/budget.html
Schools Catalogue Information Services. (2013). School library collections survey 2013. Connections, 88, 9-10. https://www.scisdata.com/media/1317/connections88.pdf
Softlink. (2020). 2020 School Library Survey – Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific preliminary findings. https://www.softlinkint.com/blog/2020-school-library-survey-APAC-early-findings/
