Tag Archives: collection management

Virtually Visiting Information Agencies

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creative depiction of video conferencing on 3 computers
creative depiction of video conferencing on 3 computers

Alexandra_Koch / Pixabay

Virtual study visits to a variety of information agencies were held as part of ETL507 – Professional experience and portfolio subject. The variety of information agencies attended in these virtual visits covered everything from school libraries, public libraries, TAFE, university, specialist libraries, and museums. The visits showcased the diversity that can be found within the information agencies and the important dynamic role that a professional information specialist plays in today’s society.

Virtually visiting Mt Alvernia highlighted the effect a passionate school librarian can have within the school community through promotion, curation, and management of their collection to their stakeholders. Listening to Sally Turbit discuss the power of MakerSpace programs to build resilience and connections within and between patrons was enlightening and inspiring. Anna Griffith from Albury Wodonga Health showcased the importance of maintaining a specialist collection through weeding to improve the functionality of the physical space and the authoritative nature of the collection itself. Paul Kloppenborg’s interviews with the library staff that work at the Learning and Information Services at the William Angliss Institute reiterate the importance of developing a team and successfully managing it to deliver better outcomes for the breadth of stakeholders. Massey University Library highlighted the importance of collaboration and building relationship with all stakeholders, while maintaining and celebrating the culture that is indigenous to the land to which the library serves. Lauren Gobbet with her role as archivist for the Royal Agricultural & Horticultural Society of SA Inc., demonstrates the ability of prioritisation of tasks that an information professional must exhibit in the face of an ever-increasing workload.

These virtual study visits are a perfect culmination of the learning that is gained through completion of the Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) course providing real life examples of why each individual subject within it are important. Through embedding themselves within the community they serve and resourcing this community by identifying their users’ needs, an information professional ensures that the important role that information agencies play within their communities is fulfilled.

 

 

ETL505 – Describing and Anlaysing Educational Resources

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Books on shelves in a library

jarmoluk / Pixabay

The ability to describe and analyse resources for a teacher librarian is crucial. This often-tedious task is relegated to staff within a school library who do not have an educational perspective in mind, which is the main perspective that users of a school library catalogue have. The usefulness of a library resource is linked to its ability to be located at the point of need. As the library users move through the five FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) tasks of finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining and exploring, their experience is affected by the organisation of the bibliographic records within the catalogue (Hider, 2018). In today’s modern school most users are accessing records remotely, the simple act of maintaining resource records to ensure that the electronic version of the text is included with the physical text record assists the users in finding the suitable resources for their needs.

Many catalogues use ‘lists’ to collate resources of the school library that will be useful for particular school assignments. Such lists allow the library staff to assist students and teachers by ‘pulling’ together resources for an assignment easily, so that students do not have to comb shelves or the catalogue individually to locate relevant resources. Although many may argue that this is not teaching students to use the catalogue effectively, some feel that this simple act ensures students locate and use published reputable information from books and hence become aware of the ease of locating quality information within a published text versus online scrolling. Inclusion of subject terms that reflect why a resource was purchased in the first place ensures that it remains useful when a specific ‘list’ or assignment is no longer relevant.

A well-maintained library catalogue that has been constructed with a curriculum focus ensures that purchased resources are not only useful but are used by the patrons they were purchased for in the first place. Cataloguing through describing and analysing resources following set guidelines ensures that users of your library can search within any catalogue in any library. This ability to transfer learnt search skills enables students to become lifelong learners.

Bibliography

Hider, P. (2018). Information resource Description (Second edition ed.). London: Facet Publishing.

The necessity of collection assessment and evaluation post Gonski 2.0

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Yellow backgroung with question marks, connected by the words who, what, when and why.
Yellow backgroung with question marks, connected by the words who, what, when and why.

KERBSTONE / Pixabay

As the sharpened blade of Gonski 2.0 starts cutting at the budgets of independent schools, libraries in this sector need to be more mindful than ever of the value of their contribution towards the school community (Koziol, 2018).  We are looking at even tighter budgets, possibly restricting not only our collection, but the staff that is expected to manage it.  So why should we invest our time and effort into assessment and evaluation of our collections when many of us are running on a skeleton crew?  The answer is evidence-based practice (EBP).  It is only through providing the statistics, figures, public responses to surveys that the people who hold the tightening purse strings of the rapidly shrinking school budget will see our value.  Like it or not we are in the service industry and if our ‘product’ is not of use we need to find out and make the changes necessary to ensure that we have repeat customers.

Assessment of our collection and evaluation of its usefulness using both quantitative and qualitative methods is necessary to ensure that we are fulfilling our purpose in the education process (Hernon, Dugan, & Matthews, 2014, p. 9).  No one method is flawless and at the heart of all assessment methods stands the staff of school libraries.

Usage data, although valuable, can be skewed.  It is useful when ‘culling’ the collection to know when it was last borrowed, but this can only be considered with the knowledge of how your patrons use the collection.  For example, our non-fiction section may rarely be ‘borrowed’ but the useful section is often scanned by our patrons for ease of use at home without restriction.  Similarly, many of our patrons sit and read our physical magazines while in the library, yet rarely ‘borrow’ thus preventing them from being included in the usage data.

Seeing where there is overlap in your collection is important in a fiscally tight budget.  In areas where the knowledge base moves quickly we need to ask – Are there free websites or do you subscribe to databases that cover the topic more cheaply that purchasing a physical book that will quickly be outdated? Mapping the curriculum through the use of Assignment Help pages in our Libguides gives our library staff a ‘user’s view’ of our collection to constantly ensure that we are providing material of use and relevant to the users’ needs.

Talking to the students throughout the research process and surveying their needs when selecting reading for pleasure material is a simple yet effective method of keeping in touch with our users’ needs.  Allowing a recommendation process often points to areas where our collection may be lacking.

We engage in ‘benchmarking’ our collection when we attend network meetings and compare our collection to those schools who have a similar demographic.  This collaborative nature of teacher librarians is essential when dealing in a rapidly changing educational environment, to help guide resource decisions.

‘Focus Groups’ for us include consulting the various departments for feedback on the value of our collection.  When suppliers bring books for approval, we ensure that what we think is relevant is previewed by the department heads.  The only problem here is ensuring that the book makes it to the library floor and is not seconded to the bookshelf of the teacher in charge.

Our library needs to be a necessary expense.  We want our customers to feel their opinions are valued.  We want them to feel that we provide a learning environment that meets their needs.  To do this we need to ensure that our ‘product’ not only looks good, but is useful, needed, and available at the right time.

References

Hernon, P., Dugan, R. E., & Matthews, J. R. (2014). Getting started with evaluation. Chicago: American Library Association. Retrieved from Proquest Ebook Central

Koziol, M. (2018, February 1). States cut funding for private schools as public system reaps Gonski rewards. The Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney, New South Wales. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/state-funding-for-private-schools-declines-as-public-schools-reap-gonski-rewards-20180131-p4yz4g.html

 

 

The practical task of evaluating the collection

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The word assess spelled out in scrable tiles on top of blank scrabble tiles.
The word assess spelled out in scrable tiles on top of blank scrabble tiles.

Wokandapix / Pixabay

In today’s climate of evidence-based practice, fiscal accountability and strategic planning, evaluation of the school library is crucial.  If we as teacher librarians are to ensure that our libraries are valued within the school context, we need to ensure our collections are meeting the needs of our users, even before they know what those needs are, building towards our visions of where our library will be.  Consistent collection assessment and evaluation helps us keep on track of our mission towards our vision, by showing us the changes that need to be made (Hernon, Dugan, & Matthews, 2014). Matthews (2014) upholds that evaluation methods fall within two broad categories: Library Centric or Customer Centric (p. 110).  These same two categories are reflected by Johnson (2014) in her use of the terms ‘Collection-based’ and ‘Use- and User-based’, however, she breaks them down further into ‘quantitative’ (counting/statistical) and ‘qualitative’ (opinion based) (p. 302).  Of the many methods of evaluation that fall under these two broad categories there are only a few that I feel are suitable and practical for the often understaffed school library team to conduct, that I myself would use.

Firstly quantitative evaluation of the collection through measuring the ‘Collection size and growth’, especially in our ‘genrified’ fiction collection is a practical and easy task to do.  In our senior library when we reclassified all fiction into specific genre areas, it was clearly noted that our humour section was lacking, despite the popularity of this genre to our year 7-8 male readers coming through from the junior library.  Using our ‘Circulation statistics’ shows us which genres and authors the boys enjoy and helps us find authors who write in a similar style to recommend to our readers of fiction.

Such quantitative analysis of our non-fiction collection, however does not work, as we have a process of placing lists suitable for assignment topics on trolleys that then are only available on a restricted loan.  This action, although ensuring accessibility to the wider cohort, skews any statistical analysis of our non-fiction circulation statistics.  It is for this reason that we use a ‘Collection mapping’ approach or a ‘Direct collection checking’ to ensure that the lists we create in our Oliver library management system meet the needs of the curriculum that the boys are studying.  Throughout the research process, we check in with the students to use their opinion, in what could be termed ‘Focus groups’, to see if the information provided within our collection is meeting their needs.  In our fiction collection we tend to ‘Survey’ our students looking for guidance in their recommendations.  We publish these results to use as promotions for reluctant readers as many surveys suggest that parent, teacher and peer recommendations are the way 6-17 year pick their books (Scholastic Australia, 2015).

References

Hernon, P., Dugan, R. E., & Matthews, J. R. (2014). Getting started with evaluation. Chicago: American Library Association. Retrieved from Proquest Ebook Central

Johnson, P. (2014). Collection analysis: Evaluation and assessment. In P. Johnson, Fudamentals of collection development and management (pp. 297-343). Chicago: American LibraryAssciation. Retrieved from Proquest Ebook Central

Matthews, J. R. (2014). Research-based planning for public libraries: Increasing relevance in the digital age. Santa-Barbara: Libraries Unlimted. Retrieved from Proquest Ebook Central

Scholastic Australia. (2015). What kids want in books. Retrieved from Australian kids & family reading report: http://www.scholastic.com.au/schools/ReadingLeaders/KFRR/whatkidswant.asp

 

 

Show me the money – Validating our collections for library budgets

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Today, more than ever, school libraries need to show their worth to hold their ground in the ever-tightening budget that governs the school community.  Evaluating and providing evidence-base practice for the use of funds has become the catch cry in every aspect of education, however, it is not a simple task (Smith, 2013).

Before you can evaluate anything, you have to be able to measure it first, and herein lies the difficulty.  A school library is no longer just physical resources of books, teachers and resources available between 7:30am and 4:30pm, it has evolved to include the intangible resources that can be accessed 24/7 by the library users.  To evaluate a library, you need both qualitative and quantitative data on the service or processes offered by the library (Matthew, 2018, p. 16).  Historically, we used quantitative collection measures focussing on input, ratio of resources to students or circulation statistics, however, these measures show activity, but not the value of the resource (Genoni, 2007, p. 126).  As a resource to the school community, we offer more than books, space and time, we offer programs and resources that can be accessed anywhere at any time and we need evaluative measurements to validate these programs existence.  These output measures track where our programs and users meet and emphasise output.  They can include: sampling/surveying individuals or groups; collection mapping; measuring student access (individual fill rates); potential curriculum support rates; and then compared to actual curriculum support rates (Kimmel, 2014, pp. 61-68).  These measurement techniques, although time consuming are invaluable to teacher librarians to ensure that the collection they have developed is truly meeting the needs of their users.  The reality of our situation as teacher librarians is that we a living in an economic time of open sources of information where many people will not see our worth unless we prove it to them empirically through statistics and data (Oddone, 2016; Novak, 2016).

References

Genoni, P. (2007). Current issues in library collection. In S. Ferguson (ed), Libraries in the twenty-first century: Charting new directions in information services (pp. 123-143). Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies. Retrieved from https://linkinghub-elsevier-com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/retrieve/pii/B9781876938437500089

Kimmel, S. C. (2014). Developing collections to empower learners. American Library Association. Retrieved from ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au

Matthew, J. R. (2018). Evaluation and measurement of library services. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited.

Novak, B. (2016). It’s time: let’s improve schools’ perceeptions of teacher librarians. Connections(99). Retrieved from https://www.scisdata.com/connections/searchconnections?searchFor=the%20importance%20of%20school%20libraries%20in%20the%20google%20age&page=1

Oddone, K. (2016). The importance of school libraries in the Google age. Connections(98). Retrieved from https://www.scisdata.com/connections/issue-98/the-importance-of-school-libraries-in-the-google-age

Smith, M. (2013, March 26). Evidence-based education: Is it really that straightforward? Retrieved from The Gaurdian: https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2013/mar/26/teachers-research-evidence-based-education

 

 

 

Selecting your electronic resources (Forum 2.7)

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Criteria for selecting electronic resources for school libraries incorporates the traditional criteria for selecting tangible resources with additional elements needed to be considered.  The nature of a library’s collection has dramatically changed to include both tangible and intangible resources and our collection criteria need to reflect this change.  Gorman (2000) redefined collection to include locally owned tangible material, tangible material owned in other linked libraries, intangible owned resources (eBooks) and remote intangible resources not owned but given access to by the library (Fieldhouse, M & Marshall, A., 2013, p 15).  Criteria such as audience, accuracy, curriculum and student outcomes consideration, as outlined by the Queensland Government Department of Education (2018) are common among many collection management policies.  These criteria remain important no matter what format the resource is delivered in if we are to maintain a collection that is both relevant and useful to our users.  What I found interesting was not the common elements, but the uncommon elements I found.

Peggy Johnson (2014) outlined several criteria I have not seen written about in such depth in any other list.  These uncommon elements when selecting e-resources included:

  • The provider’s business model
    • Is access time based or do you own the content?
    • How is the cost determined? Access based, site licence, or pay per view?
    • Do you have D.R.M (Digital Rights Management) to copy, print, save?
  • What is the persistency of content?
    • Does the content remain unchanged during license?
    • Do you have permanent access to content after agreement ends?
  • Functionality of User Interface
    • Will users be able to use it intuitively?
    • Can they search, bookmark, go to the table of contents?
  • Ease of Authentication – protects privacy and allows control, but needs to be simple
    • Username and password
    • Single Sign on
    • IP address Range
  • Accessibility functions both technical (will it link to other resources and be available on different devices) and design (disability features)
  • Local Service implications – Is there help or support?
  • Does it have URL compliance?
  • Output and delivery options – can you print, bookmark, highlight
  • Compatibility – Does it work with different devices?
  • Is it a duplication or a replacement?
  • Can you access data to measure effective use – COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) – econtent should be COUNTER compliant.
  • Deselection – can you switch out titles? Are resources available elsewhere?

All libraries are aiming for “affordable, practical, perpetual, or permanent access to content” (Johnson, 2014, p27).  To achieve this, within a budget, requires librarians to make decisions based on their particular library’s situation and the teachers and students who use it.

 

References

Fieldhouse, M., & Marshall, A. (2013). Collection development in the digital age. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Johnson, P. (2014). Developing and managing electronic collections: the essentials. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Queensland Government Department of Education. (2018). Collection development and management. Retrieved from http://education.qld.gov.au/library/support/collection-dev.html

 

Curating with Libguides

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Libguides is a curating platform created by Springshare and used by libraries across the world to share content, curate websites, information and resources with their users.  The possibilities are endless with how you can use this platform and only limited, really, by your imagination.  Scotch College in Perth, Western Australia offers a fantastic example of the possibilities that Libguides offer their users.

When you first go to the Libguide you are greeted with a choice of libraries: Junior; Middle; or Senior.  Working in a senior library myself, I was interested in how they use Libguides for their Senior Library.  What I found was an extremely easy to navigate visual presentation of resources available for the lucky students of Scotch College.  The Libguide offers a central portal to all material that the library has collated. Including: Best Books for Teens, eBooks/audio, Library Catalogue (Oliver), Staff Reading, Research Guides, Databases, Referencing. Databases are password protected, which is to be expected for licensing laws.  Through this guide, there are many links to videos, websites and other curating tools such as Goodreads.  The library management system used by the school, Oliver, is seamlessly integrated into the pages.

Viewing this Libguide has set off a myriad of ideas for how we can better use our own Libguide pages.  Thank you Scotch college for allowing the public to access to your libguide.

Scotch College’s Libguides https://library.scotch.wa.edu.au/researchguides

 

References

Scotch College. (2016). library.SCOTCH. Retrieved from https://library.scotch.wa.edu.au/

Springshare. (2017). LibGuides – Content management and curation platform for libraries. Retrieved from https://www.springshare.com/libguides/

 

Must Read Article – Apps and eResources

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I have just finished reading an amazing article on collecting and cataloguing electronic resources written by Kay Cantwell  (2013) Living appily ever after in the library, and my head is buzzing.

This practical article sets out succinctly how to identify, curate, collect, promote and evaluate apps for your school library.  The evaluation checklist compiled by Kay is a fantastic resource to have on hand for teachers to use before requesting the purchase or use of an app.  Throughout the article there are links to google forms for the purpose of requesting purchase and evaluating apps purchased.  The school I am currently working in uses a similar Microsoft product called Forms.  Reading this article has reminded me of the ease at which we as librarians can get feedback and requests from our students and teachers.  Utilising a library Pinterest page to promote recommended electronic resources is a brilliant yet simple idea.

Cantwell, K. (2013). Living appily ever after in the library. Connections, 86, 6-7. Retrieved from http://www2.curriculum.edu.au/scis/connections/issue_86_2013/articles/living_appily_ever_after_in_the_library.html