Upon reading an article in this subject, I found it interesting to find that students don’t find books interesting when they are recommend it by a teacher librarian. In completing this module it now makes sense as to why. How do we know the students reading ability or their reading age – and what we could be recommending is either be to hard or to easy. 

Physical arrangement of the fiction genre is an important aspect of the library layout. Our school library is just white wooden shelves that hold the majority of fiction books. Junior fiction is organised into red tubs. Senior fiction is on the other side of the library and arranged alphabetically. Having not worked in a library for many years, I do often look at the current school library and it hasn’t changed in the last 5 years that I have worked there. It really frustrates me, because the library could be such a vibrant space if we just moved some shelves around. 

The topic of genrefication was suggested in the module. In one of my subjects I completed an assignment on genrefication and by the end of it, I was on the fence about it. I think that it would be interesting to try that model and see if it makes a difference to our library. I too often see students walking up and down to find a book. Also our Accelerated Reader books are intermixed with the fiction and this is my biggest bug bear. I feel these books should be on their own and in levelled shelves so that students can quickly find a book in their level. 

In one of the articles in this module, it was mentioning about students being in the library and reading – I don’t see that often in our library, I think because it is the same and quite boring. We had students come in to play games at lunchtimes but apparently they were hiding chess pieces so the games cupboard is now locked and the library is quite quiet. I think our library needs to be rearranged and made more exciting so that students want to come in and read. 

I need to investigate what e-resources we have access to in the library as this is another aspect of the collection that I don’t know much about. 

Censorship and challenging fiction 

From ETL503 I know that students should be given the right to access all books but for some schools this may not be the case. I highly believe that as TL’s we should read books to ensure we are happy with the content and make the decision as to whether we would like to include that book. I know this may go against students access all books, but we did need to be confident and knowledgeable about what is on our library shelves.