I visit a lot of schools in my current position, and we often find ourselves teaching or registering students in the heart of the school (a.k.a. the library). We often see amazing arrays of books, magazines and other physical resources on display and it is rare that I don’t pick up something to read. This often leads to chatting with the library staff – and this meant that over the last two days I was able to have two fascinating discussions with library specialists (one TL and LT) about the challenges of developing and maintaining parts of their physical collection.

The first, with a teacher librarian in a mid-sized Catholic primary school in the north west of Brisbane, encompassed that the two areas she found most difficult to develop and manager were senior fiction and graphic novels. She commented further that in both cases, the content was sometimes misaligned with reading level – that is to say, mature content was not always appropriate for advanced readers of a primary age. The school has holistic policies under constant development in order to inform practice around selection and deselection of books as necessary.

The second, with a library technician in charge of the primary years library at a regional P-12 independent school, focussed on the difficulty in balancing the non-fiction books in the collection to include current, relevant curriculum support material with publications that fulfil the brief of catering to student interests. She explained that while acquisition is heavily dependent on how budgets are released, the process of weeding out material that is no longer useful/relevant is sometimes more difficult.

The focus in primary is still very much on the physical collection rather than the digital as a point of consistency (by virtue of device access in many cases). While some subscriptions to digital resources are maintained by TLs, there is little required beyond requisitioning the necessary funding, with updates undertaken in real-time by the publishing company.

My reflection: As we see a downward shift in development (i.e., earlier maturity) and better understanding of gifted populations, I can see this process of selection and deselection in sophisticated-but-appropriate material in all three areas becoming more and more relevant to TLs, LTs and LAs. I think the continual revision (or in some cases, creation) of a policy to guide successive librarianships is an essential step in ensuring the collection and community use continues to prosper. Gifted ed practitioners, literacy support staff, and information resource specialists – create/watch this space!