ETL 503 Reflective Commentary:

Does Context Doth Make Cowards of us All? 

                      Shakespeare’s Hamlet reflected that the conscience doth make cowards of us all.   For teacher librarians (TL), knowing the context of the school community and its needs and goals is paramount to leading into the twenty first century (Marzano, McNulty & Waters, 2005, p. 18). The librarian that is out of touch with the school’s current needs and goals runs the risk of embodying the dated stereotype of a librarian that hides behind their desk and “shushes” every sound in the room. Librarians need to have their finger on the pulse of the school and create an environment that promotes lifelong learning. Without contextual understanding the librarian is a coward tucked in the back corner of the building, who, like Hamlet, is stuck in limbo about what is to be done next.

                      Understanding the curriculum is arguably the most important area of school context for the TL as they have the opportunity to support teachers and students simultaneously. Initially I thought this was a rather straightforward process, you simply buy the books that teachers need and students want. I was wrong. As Peggy Johnson states, “Selection is both an art and a science…a combination of knowledge, experience and intuition” (2009, p. 108). Johnson’s text was the most influential for me throughout the course and the above quotation illuminated a lot of what collection development is about. Selection is complex and needs to involve many stakeholders to ensure needs are being met (IFLA 2001). You must wrestle with the desires of your stakeholders, who may want an entire section dedicated to Game of Thrones, and the lesser-known texts that you think may broaden their horizons. You must also consider print and digital media issues. Should you scrap the printed non-fiction section and move completely digital? Though there are likely cost and physical space benefits to weeding these print texts, it turns out that not everyone is on board with digital reading as it leads to distraction and inefficient multitasking (Rosenwald, 2015). Not to mention that e-books and subscriptions come with subscription length issues and when purchasing bundles you may be paying for irrelevant texts. As Sue Kimmel notes, the shift towards e-books, like selection itself, is filled with unsettling challenges and limitless opportunities (2014, p. 51).
          In reading classmate Pooja Mathur’s blog (2017), I noticed that she was struggling with discerning the difference between collection management and collection development. Mathur (2017) paraphrased Johnson (2009), noting that management is an umbrella term that incorporates development along with other relevant policies. This encouraged me to further explore Johnson (2011) and the beginning of chapter five helped me simplify the complexities between management and development, stating that management covers: “… all the decisions made after an item is part of the collection (2009, p. 151). Although other documentation uses the terms interchangeably, Johnson’s chapter aided me in grasping these concepts. Development is about building the collection, while management encompasses all the details about items that are already in the collection.

                      Another area of growth for my own understanding of the TLs role in developing collections was the necessity to include a freedom to information doctrine in the development policy (Dawson, 2010). This aided me in understanding that people may object to a text being available and how careful a TL must be in recognizing why a text may be deemed contentious. The importance of having selection criteria to help justify why a text has been chosen is crucial. If texts are selected on arbitrary basis, then any stakeholder with an issue may hold the right to have a text excluded from the collection. Building selection criteria that aim to be inclusive can provide the foundation for “multicultural and comprehensive” (Jones, 2009, p. 133) collection and protect the library from unnecessary censorship.

                      It is the cyclical nature of a collection development policy (CDP), which forces the library to crystalize its current goals and revisit them in a timely fashion to ensure they are in line with school’s needs (ALIA, 2007). By building a policy that acts in the present and prepares for the future, TLs and stakeholders can shape the collection to aid in student learning in an ever-changing world of information creation and communication. So, TLs without a current CDP it is time to rise up from behind the desk, align your school goals with the library’s collection and prove that context does not make cowards of us all!