Tag Archives: Teacher Librarian Roles

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.

 

 

Curation not Hoarding

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Ask a teenage student to show you their desktop, or for that matter, ask a teacher. Without doubt in most cases you will see an assortment of files, links and short cuts dumped on their home screens. Welcome to the age of digital hoarding. The art of curation is a necessity for everybody in a digital learning environment and teacher librarians are best placed to instructional lead their institutions in best practice (Valenza, 2012).

Content curation has always happened at schools, but the digital information overload and the rate it is happening at is leaving some washed in its wake. We are both consuming and producing information at a phenomenal rate, and no more so than in an educational setting, where emails and communications fly.  Think of the information we collect – emails, documents, music, videos, photos. How can students cope with this influx unless we teach them the valuable skills of curation? Curation is the art of not only collecting but organising and adding value to those resources (Wheeler & Gerver, 2015).

When I picture well curated resources, strangely I think of Marie Kondo and her method of decluttering spaces called KonMari (Kondo, 2015). The KonMari method gets its’ followers to work out what you want to keep first – Does it bring you joy?  The second step is to organise by grouping. Finally, it is the storing and labelling.

Curation takes a very similar path. Before we can teach both students and teachers how to curate, we need to teach them how to declutter and decide what is worth keeping or curating.  A good curator will also ask key questions – do I need it? And is it worth it? Only the individual curator can answer the first question, need is very subjective.  The second question of ‘worth’ is one of evaluating validity. The CRAP method is a popular choice for students’ evaluation of sources, possibly due to its crass mnemonic.

C – currency

R – reliability

A – Authority

P – Point of view or purpose.

(Charles Sturt University Library, 2019)

Once a resource has been deemed worthy of collection it is time to organise it.  Where will you store it? Is it worth sharing? How will you label it – so you can find it easily when needed or so it has relevance to those you share it with? This is where folders, playlists, and tagging come into their own.  By labelling resources with key terms that will group it with other similar resources we improve our workflow.  Today’s digital affordance allows us to group, sort and store in multiple places for multiple uses, maximising our curated resource exposure. Through adding tags and grouping items we are adding value to the resource, ensuring its usefulness.

There are two types of curation:

  1. Personal Curation – finding, organising and labelling resources for your personal use. Some examples are:
    • Storing of personal files
    • Cataloguing of emails
    • Using bookmarks on web browser with folders
    • Signing into Youtube and creating private playlists or channels
    • Spotify/Music Online – creating playlists.
    • Images into albums on your devices.
  2. Collective Curation – The ability to curate resources together and comment on others’ curations. Some examples are:
    • Website Curation tools like Diigo, Pinterest, Pearltrees, Elib…
    • Openly sharing resources through networks and social media.

Collective curation builds collaboration and enhances communication.  Teaching students the ability to curate, and then engaging them in projects which utilise collective curation has the potential to deepen learning and create higher order thinking (Gonzalez, April 15, 2017). Mobile Digital Curation allows for learning to happen anywhere, anytime and breaks the walls of the classroom. Mobile devices have opened our ability to find, select, organise, create and share resources.

Students need the digital literacy skills that will enable them to do this well, and in the process curate themselves a positive digital footprint.

 

Charles Sturt University Library (Producer). (2016). How to evaluate information. [Online Video] Retrieved from https://youtu.be/hp5xasNuHL8

Gonzalez, J. (April 15, 2017). To boost higher-order thinking.  Retrieved from https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/curation/

Kondo, M. (2015). The life-changing magic of tidying. London: Ebury Publishing.

Valenza, J. (2012). Curation! (Vol. 29).

Wheeler, S., & Gerver, R. (2015). Learning with ‘e’s : Educational theory and practice in the digital age. In. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=1918927

 

 

Influences on a high school library

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School libraries support and innovate to help the school community meet the demands of the curriculum and the community within which they are situated. Through interactions with all departments within the school they aim to resource the teachers and equip the students through delivery of resources, both physical and intangible that fulfil the cross curriculum priorities and build the general capabilities of students as outlined in the Australian Curriculum. A major focus is the delivery of ICT skills ensuring that all members of the community are ready for the evolving information society of today. Whole school priorities are address by the library, such as literacy initiatives and new technologies that are included in the school resources.
Within the school structure the library is situated in the heart of the school acting as a conduit for all its customers: teachers, students, parents and administration. It is important that teacher librarian not only understands the curriculum but also the needs of the school community.  Attending departmental meeting, being part of committees and having a strong working relationship with the curriculum leaders team helps ensure that the library is not only adequately meeting current needs, but also building for future needs before they arise.

Schools need to be able to respond to the society they are in. Just as businesses cater for their customers, schools need to cater for their students’ needs. Rigid standards put in place for all schools regardless of the community that they serve is antiquated. Individual education plans that allow for teachers to cater for the needs of their students will allow for students to reach their full potential. “Divergent thinking” on how to best educate students will allow our students to meet the changing needs of our society (Robinson, 2010). Promoting collaboration in both teachers and students allows for them to thrive and the school library is the perfect place for this to be demonstrated.

Robinson, K. [RSA Animate]. (2010, October 14). Changing education paradigms [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Created using Lucidchart.com

Created using Lucidchart.com

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

 

 

Using Creative Commons

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Helping our teachers and students understand copyright is fundamental if we are to help our schools develop ethical digital citizens.  It is easier than ever to ‘copy’ creative works, yet fundamental that we realise the importance of attributing the work correctly and checking that it can be used in the manner intended before we proceed.   Copyright and fair-use can be very complicated and to help clarify, I have located some fantastic resources, available for reuse, which can be used for teachers or students.

Copyright and Fair Use Animation is a short video explaining the need for copyright and the terms of fair use.  There are two levels of video discussion questions available from the Common Sense Education website for if you sign up as a member.

(Common Sense Education, 2014) Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Greg Lloyd’s YouTube video “Simple Creative Commons image search” helps visual students understand how to find images that have been labelled for reuse using various search tools.

(Lloyd, 2009)  Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons have also created a PDF for students and teachers called Finding CC materials using the Creative Commons Search Portal explaining how to use the search functions in the Creative Commons website which is available for distribution (ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, n.d.).

It is our role as educators to ensure that our students are equipped with the knowledge and understanding of how to be ethical digital citizens.  Teaching them how to source their images, music, and videos without breaking copyright is part of this education.

References

ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. (n.d.). How to find Creative Commons materials using the Creative Commons search portal. Retrieved from https://creativecommons.org.au/content/Finding_CC_Materials_CC-Search-_edu.pdf

Common Sense Education. (2014, September 5). Copyright and fair use animation [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/suMza6Q8J08

Lloyd, G. (2009, December 30). Simple creative commons image search [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/nfy21jx6X3E

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

 

 

 

The Role of the Teacher Librarian

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The role of the Teacher Librarian (TL) within an educational setting is as varied and complex as the definition of what is “information”.  My career has seen me evolve from teaching in a Primary School setting to, being a parent relying on the Library services, to now working within a secondary school.  Through my experience with Teacher Librarians across those three aspects I have seen Teacher Librarians who are seen as critical to the operation of the school and those whose skills are underutilized and undervalued.

As a teacher, I used my Teacher Librarian as my collaborator in educating my students.  She assisted me in resourcing my elaborate ideas of units and seemed to instantly know what resource would be just perfect to help me convey my idea to my students.  We planned together and during the library lesson that I was allocated for my “non-contact time” my TL provided my class with lessons that were crucial to the development of their skills required for the unit of work we were completing at the time.   This was the teacher librarian exhibiting all three of the main roles of a Teach Librarian:  information specialist; information service manager and a Curriculum leader (Australian School Library Association, 2014).  I remember being quite shocked when I discovered that this was not how all the teachers used their time.  Many saw the library lessons as “baby sitting and borrowing”, as they had no idea what the teacher Librarian was doing with their class.  To me this was an absolute disrespect to the professional nature of the Teacher Librarian role.

Further insight into how Teacher Librarians are perceived by their colleagues and in particular administration was gained when I was a parent.  The enormity of the role of information management is often underrated and undervalued by the administration.  The extra hours and time that Library staff often has to put into to their libraries to manage their collection goes unseen.  As a parent, I would volunteer to assist in some of the menial, but crucial, tasks of covering books, sorting and culling the collection.  The continual flow of ‘hard’ resources that goes through a Primary School Library is hard to comprehend, that is until the aide gets sick and it piles up around the desk!  The only way for many Teacher Librarians to cope with this is to use volunteers to supplement the often meagerly staffed department they are in charge of, even though what is really necessary is more time and money to allow for the Teacher Librarian to embed themselves within each year levels planning meetings.

Currently I work within the secondary system, and in a world where many schools are underfunding their libraries and specialist teacher librarians running these libraries are in decline, we are endeavouring to make ourselves indispensable within the school community (Matthews,n.d.).  Despite what many schools thought when individual computers became the norm in Australian classrooms, both teachers and students needed someone to help them gain access to quality information and programs through these devices.  The overcrowded curriculum has certainly made it difficult for individual teachers to be on the cusp of all things digital, so many are turning to their Teacher Librarian for support and guidance.  This is where I currently see the role of the Teacher Librarian – acting as a conduit between the “information” the teachers, the students and the curriculum.

Works Cited

Australian School Library Association. (2014, March 2). What is a teacher librarian? Retrieved March 8, 2017, from ASLA – Australian School Library Association: http://www.asla.org.au/advocacy/what-is-a-teacher-librarian.aspx

Matthews, K. (n.d.). So where have all our school teacher librarians gone? Retrieved March 8, 2017, from Kidspot: http://www.kidspot.com.au/school/primary/real-life/so-where-have-all-our-school-teacher-librarians-gone

 

The changing nature of our school libraries

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Photo by Tuur Tisseghem from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/books-bookshop-bookstore-business-626986/

The trend of purchasing and viewing books through an online environment has had a profound effect on school libraries and their collections, changing both the nature of the catalogue of materials held and the user of the libraries themselves.  School libraries, like all businesses involved in the production and sale of books, are corks “floating on a digital stream”, and as the digital world changes libraries adapt to the environment (Shatzkin, 2015, para. 6).

The  school library catalogue was once the font of all knowledge, just as book stores were the primary place of purchase for printed media.  Today, students can complete their assessment tasks without stepping foot inside the physical building of the library.  We are facing the same challenge that books stores today face, where our quality resources are ignored for the simplicity of a google search (Shatzkin, 2016, para. 13).  Our customers, students, want ease of access to quality resources.  We need to be able to provide them with electronic resources, such as databases and online journals that meet their needs, and at the same time teach them to how to evaluate the information they find for ‘free’ and remind them of the value of printed books.

The way we purchase for our collections is having a profound effect on the reading environment of our society.  Once you could find a bookstore anyway.  Now you have to hunt for one, as they slip into the state of becoming endangered species.  We have to admit that when we opt to  purchase our books through online companies, such as Book Depository or Amazon, we are squeezing the physical presence of the little bookshop down the road out, even though that may be the very place that we were promoted the book before purchasing online (Shatzkin, 2016, para. 21).  When these stores go, so does the passionate individual who has possibly encouraged many of our students to become readers in the first place by recommending the “magic book”, as Mem Fox terms it, to the parent of a reluctant reader that sets their children on a life long journey of the joys of reading.

 

References

Shatzkin, M. (2015, November 17). Big focus at DBW 2016 on the tech companies that are shaping the world the book business has to live in [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.idealog.com/blog/big-focus-at-dbw-2016-on-the-tech-companies-that-are-shaping-the-world-the-book-business-has-to-live-in/

Shatzkin, M. (2016, January 10). Book publishing lives in an environment shaped by larger forces and always has [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.idealog.com/blog/book-publishing-lives-in-an-environment-shaped-by-larger-forces-and-always-has/