December 2022 – Siana’s Teacher Librarian Musings

Key Issues for Digital Resources

As these articles are a decade old, so much has changed since their publication. Much of the processes outlined have been streamlined and refined. There is still much (much) course material to get to, but when time allows I will look to see if there is an updated version.

In the ALIA (2013) report on elending issues, the context sets out that the demand for ebooks is growing fast. Now in 2022, we know that ebooks already have a reliable and growing market. As “Libraries have always been about equity of access to information and stories, whatever the format,” (ALIA, 2013), we must ensure ebooks are available to our school communities in our collections.

The ALIA article outlined the struggle publishers face to ensure the e-lending model is economically viable and their concerns with DRM. I am sure that in 2013, publishers would have been still strategising how they can make e-lending economically viable. However, with Wheelers, BorrowBox and StoryBox, this is not a concern in 2022.

However all of the subscription resources have been requested by various departments so support the teaching and learning goals of our school. Issues of access, authentication, compatibility, functionality and reliability and interface, search and retrieval and search strategies are smooth as the vendors have refined their process to make it so for libraries. Public, academic and school libraries make up a fair slice of the market, so vendors have had to adapt and adjust to ensure that all these processes are streamlined to accomodate their clients.

When purchasing new subscriptions, I would check with our IT department that the resource could be integrated into our system seamlessly. When we purchased LearnPath, for example, we received some basic training as part of the package. For the more sophisticated techniques, we had to pay for an advanced course. It is a good idea to check that quality and timely customer support is available.

Concerns around e-lending may have, in 2013, involved fair pricing. From what I understand, this is not an issue anymore. The exception to this is audiobooks, which is understandable given the additional production costs. Ownership also may have been a concern in 2013, however now there is currently the opportunity to retain permanent ownership of e-materials. I do wonder how this permanency may be affected when a supplier ceases trading and will ask my Head of Libraries plus my friends working in publishing about this.

There is a range of pricing models between Wheelers and our online subscriptions and these pricing models are considered carefully by the Head of Library before purchasing. Certainly e-resources bring new layers of complexity. When considering new subscriptions, it is definitely important to think about the size of the actual user group and not the total user population. It is also important to read the licensing agreement carefully before signing up, to ensure that expectations between the TL/Head of Department and the vendor are aligned. The license agreement should include, for example, a guaranteed up time of more than 99%, provide bibliographic data, and provide online help screens. Considering the data leaks and hacks that are occurring regularly with major organisations, it would definitely be a good idea to check that the license ensures “the privacy and confidentiality of the users’ information when accessing the e-resource” (Johnson et al, 2012).

Our school currently does not have a selection policy, so when I create one I will have a separate one for e-resources, taking into account the above concerns plus any updated issues from 2022 that we should also factor in.

References

Johnson, S., Evensen, O.G., Gelfand, J., Lammers, G., Sipe, L., & Zilper, N. (2012). Key issues for e-resource collection development: a guide for libraries, IFLA Acquisition and Collection Development Committee.

ALIA. (2013). eBooks and elending issues paper. Australian Library and Information Association Think Tank, 15 February 2013.

Acquiring E-books

This blogpost is a response to chapter 6 from in Sue Polanka’s No Shelf Required: E-Books Libraries. In many ways this chapter seemed irrelevant in my current context as it was written in 2002, and in the last 20 years there has been much change: the processes of acquiring e-books has been streamlined and refined.

In my current context, we have a subscription through Wheelers Books which gives our school community access to the consortium. Additionally, we purchase titles that are requested by patrons (patron driven acquisition—PDA). We purchase additional licenses for titles that are on the school curriculum, particularly for English. This hybrid approach seems to work really well for our students and staff.

However for future contexts, there are some important things I can keep in mind, such as ensuring that E-reference and E-text books are available to ensure school-wide accessibility. E-literature is a must: students must have access to literature day and night, from wherever they are. At my previous context with a tighter budget, I encouraged students to sign up to be a member of their local library so that they could have access to BorrowBox and thus thousands of E-books and audio books. In my current context, we are encouraging our students to make use of our well-resourced library as much as possible, so providing an option for students to have their book requests fulfilled is ideal.

I wonder which vendors provide pay-per-view, as this is not a process I am familiar with in the school library context but in some ways makes a lot of sense. In my previous context we received standing orders from Scholastic, which yielded very mixed quality so I do generally prefer to hand-select, however sometimes that is not humanly possible with time constraints.

Reference:

Jenkinson, D. (2002). Selection and censorship: It’s simple arithmetic. School libraries in Canada, 2(4), 22.

Book Challenges, Censorship and Democracy

It was interesting to read about other TLs experiences of censorship in schools and how they handle book challenges. As librarians, we are defenders of democracy by ensuring that the spectrum of opinions and experiences are available for our students.

Like freedom of speech, sometimes it is hard to know where the line is and everyone will have a different opinion on this. I would not want to include any hate speech in my library. I also would like to read more about “Cancel Culture” as when I understand that an author is inherently racist, I no longer wish to read their books or financially support them by purchasing their work (i.e. Sally Rooney refusing to have her books translated into Hebrew is an act of racism).

It is impossible to read all of the fiction titles before we purchase. In my context, we try to spread out our reading of fiction titles between the TLs, and the expectation is that we read at least one book per week from the Library’s YA collection (preferably in different genres).

Although I work in a faith-based school, the staff, students and parents are open-minded. Parents are just happy if their children are reading … if there is a lot of swearing or references to unsavoury behaviour in the book, I’m guessing the students would not tell their parents. We do not have a formal challenge procedure. I have asked my Library manager and she has said it has never come up. We are happy to make those decisions in-house, and the community appears to respect our professional judgment.

In my previous school, book challenges occurred over a lot of material, especially over swearing, sexual content and violence. It did not make it easy that we had the primary and secondary library all together in the one spot. Inevitably primary students were trying to borrow secondary books that were not age appropriate. For the assistants who were on circulation, some books slipped through. I do believe though that books are not the problem when it comes to swearing, sex and violence. Really, the problems are TikTok, YouTube and freely available content on the deep dark web.

I also think freedom of access to information must be taught hand-in-hand with information literacy, as we can easily access all sorts of information and opinions, but our students must learn which ones to trust, and which ones are rubbish because they are not grounded in facts and truth.

Community standards is something that TLs working in faith-based schools must be aware of, to ensure that we are not censuring for fear of reproach. We must learn to defend our choices and this comes back to having a sound selection policy.

Also interesting to consider the fact that it’s not enough simply to purchase materials, but also to make sure that cataloguing makes the resources readily available.

I am relieved to read the IFLA and ALIA statements opposing censorship in libraries, and these statements can be referred to if/when books are challenged.

References:

Moody, K. (2005). Covert censorship in libraries: A discussion paper. Australian Library Journal, 54(2), 138-147.

Lukenbill, W.B. (2007). Censorship: What do school library specialists really know? School Library Media Research, 10. http://www.ala.org/aasl/sites/ala.org.aasl/files/content/aaslpubsandjournals/slr/vol10/SLMR_Censorship_V10.pdf

School Library Journal Research. (2016). Controversial books survey

Censorship in the School Library

When selecting or withdrawing a resource, the context must always be considered.

At my children’s local primary school, the leadership have employed a business “Talking the Talk” to teach the children from prep onwards about puberty and body parts, gender fluidity and identities, right up to sex and reproduction in the older years. Learning about sex early makes it less taboo and teenagers are more likely to make better, more informed choices. I believe this is appropriate and genitalia are indeed body parts that we all own! Also, we have prep students transitioning gender, so all students should be open minded about this to support all peers. Also there are many types of families and this should be normalised from the first day.

At my previous school, an Anglican school, the Library Manager made a rule that from the third Harry Potter onwards the students needed to be in Year 7. I personally found this strange as I taught for years in a public school and most of the students had read all the Harry Potters by year 5. I thought this was fantastic – that was a lot of reading mileage! The Library Manager said it was because Harry Potter was too violent. I didn’t agree but also understand the reasoning; I too do not wish to expose students to violence but who gets to draw this line?

Similarly this year we have many students (and staff) requesting Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us. I understand the choice to remove the book as the sex scenes were explicit. However, I know that many state secondary schools have chosen to keep the book, as it definitely gets kids reading! It is an important exploration of abusive relationships. Also, we know that many students are engaging in intimate activities and that this is not new to them! Again – who gets to draw this line? Students who have experienced abuse must be able to see their experiences reflected in the pages of a book – they must know that they are not alone.

Grey areas that do not exist is representation. LGBTQI fiction and non fiction (such as Nevo Levin’s The Pronoun Lowdown) is a must for school libraries. I did have to argue for this in my previous school, but my team came on board – especially when they saw how popular these books are.

Additional Selection Criteria for Resource Format Considerations

The use of additional specific selection criteria that relates to resource format considerations is very important to ensure that all students have access to the library collection. It is only through outlining specific selection criteria that the school library can ensure that access is carefully considered and implemented.

For example, a criteria would outline how fiction ebooks are selected. In my context, I know that we subscribe to Wheelers books but I don’t know how it is decided which ebooks and audiobooks we acquire. We definitely have more hard copy titles of fiction than ebooks. Perhaps selection of ebooks would be based on popularity (books sold, #BookTok), awards, teacher requests.

Another consideration would need to be that the ebooks must cover all levels of difficulty, with a quota of ebooks in dyslexic formats, be representative of diversity in all its forms (culture, ethnicity, language, religion, beliefs, community and family structure, sexual orientation, and more), and present a spectrum of points of view.

We would need a criteria on ensuring that curated electronic resources are provided in the form of Libguides for any assessment requested by teachers. There would need to be criteria around these eresources and websites to ensure that all TLs are scrupulous about their background checking … I know it is expected, but we can’t be too careful! Also the resources provided would need to provide a breadth and diversity of viewpoints to encourage students to form informed judgements through developing their critical thinking skills.

There would be a criteria that ensures that we have resources that are multimodal, that are audio, and video as well – and perhaps even outlining a quota for this. This would be an evolving document, if for example a student or staff member joined our school community with vision impairments and requiring books in braille, we would build this collection as well.

Building a Balanced Collection

In my current school context, I believe we do have a balanced collection. We have a healthy budget, so we can get all the latest fiction titles in every genre and we have got all the genres covered. We regularly evaluate the collection to ensure that titles are weeded as they become outdated and irrelevant. I do believe we need to revisit the genres, however, as who even says “Ooh my favourite genre is Social Issues, I better head to that section!” Same goes for “Person-to-person”.

In any case, we seem to have non-fiction fairly covered for each of the assignment tasks also. However again, I think we could have a thorough look at what needs to be updated. I work in a Zionist school, and some of the books on Israel are so old. I understand it is difficult to acquire titles that are age-appropriate and up-to-date on this topic, however we definitely must do some research in this area!

I enjoyed the Crowley (2015) article about Graphic Novels, and completely agree that they are a great medium and enticing stepping stone into the world of literature for our reluctant readers. Sometimes it can be difficult to encourage students to have a balanced literary diet once they have discovered graphic novels … but this collection must be prioritised in the school library. We have a good collection, but again it could be given some more love.

Crowley (2015) mentioned getting involved with the Stan Less Excelsior Award for developing the graphic novel collection and it sounds like a wonderful idea except that I am not aware of anything similar in Australia. Our school was involved this year in the inaugural CBCA shadow judging competition. If there was a Book of the Year category for graphic novels, that would be an excellent start; it would encourage more local publishers to publish local graphic novels creators as well! We have brought graphic novels into our wide reading program as well, as mentioned in the article.

I also enjoyed Fleishhacker’s (2017) article suggesting titles of science books in a number of formats including science-based fiction and graphic novels, science-based novels, illustrated science biographies, science-based nonfiction graphic novel series. Fleishhacker (2017) says “A well-rounded library collection provides plenty of choices that will intrigue individual readers, encourage them to discover books that speak to their unique interests and needs, and allow them to chart their own personalised course through the process of acquiring knowledge.” I love this quote because it is through applying this idea to our collections that we can ensure that all our students feel seen and heard. And when our students can discover books they love, they will be on course to be a self-motivated reader and lifelong learner!

Jacobson’s (2016) article about censorship was interesting, as this has come up recently in my school. Many students were asking for the #BookTok sensation – Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us. Staff members were also asking for this title. I work in a faith-based school and it was deemed inappropriate for our collection due to several explicit sex scenes. I can understand the decision, and the students at our school would be able to buy the book from a shop, borrow it from the local library, or borrow it from each other. In many ways I felt it was a shame as the book had important messages in it around domestic abuse that I felt was beneficial for a teenage audience.

I think there is more book challenging in the USA because it is a more conservative country than Australia. I have not heard of a single book being challenged at my school. We do not have a policy or procedure regarding this, so it’s entirely possible it has not come up. We do have books on a range of identities, spread right throughout the collection.

References:

Crowley, J. (2015). Graphic novels in the school library: Using graphic novels to encourage reluctant readers and improve literacy. The School Librarian, 63(3), 140-142.

Fleishhacker, J. (2017). Collection development. Knowledge Quest, 45(4), 24–31.

Jacobson, L. (2016). Unnatural selection. School Library Journal, 62(10), 20–24.

McEwen, I. (2018). Trending now. Teacher Librarian, 45(3), 50–52.

Sekeres, D. C. (2009). The market child and branded fiction: A synergism of children’s literature, consumer culture, and new literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(4), 399-414.

Stephens, W. (2014). Checking out tomorrow’s school library collections. Young Adult Library Services, 12(3), 18–20.