5.1. Consider models and methods for collection evaluation which may effectively relate to the learning and teaching context, the needs of users and the school library collection within your school, or in a school which you are familiar with.
What are the practicalities of undertaking a collection evaluation within a school in terms of time, staffing, and priorities, as well as appropriateness of methodology?
Choosing the appropriate evaluation method is most important to make the routine collection evaluation feasible and practical in the school library. School libraries are always short of staff and time because the teacher librarians have a busy schedule of supervising students, managing classes attending the library and performing many administrative tasks.
I consider the following methods suggested by Grigg (2012) are most practical to be implemented in my school library:
- Usage data – this method can be undertaken as regularly as needed by using the statistics reports of the library management system. But it may not show the usefulness of the collection in details.
- Focus groups – this method can be used in conjunction with the “usage data” method when I want to find out the feedback about a particular collection from the regular user group but the “focus group” method can be time consuming because it can only be conducted within a small group. TL may find it hard to get the targeted group together for the interview due to time constraint. However, TL can try to interview students as they come to the library to borrow books from that collection during lunch time.
- Benchmarking – this method can provide a holistic view about a collection when compared with a similar collection in other school libraries. This method needs TL to proactively connect with other school libraries. Benchmarking provides an excellent networking opportunity. However, school libraries don’t usually exercise the purposeful planning that is required to generate reliable usage data needed for benchmarking.
- Survey instruments – this method will work well with teachers. Most teachers are willing to give feedback to the TL when the survey questions are clear, brief and relevant to the teachers’ needs. Therefore, well designed questions are most important in order to get more teachers to respond to the survey. Teachers are busy and would ignore the survey if they cannot see the relevance of the questions asked in the survey.
How does the need for, and possible benefits of an evaluation of the collection outweigh the difficulties of undertaking such an evaluation?
For many years, librarians employed the just-in-case philosophy in anticipation of what might be needed by students, teachers and the schools (Grigg, 2012). But today, library is not intended to be a permanent storehouse of society’s knowledge but rather a resource for students and teachers to explore topics beyond those found in classroom textbooks or teachers’ notes. The benefit of continuously evaluating the collection is that the Teacher Librarian can ensure the library management policy reflects the needs of the curriculum, the teachers and the students. The money is properly spent on the most required areas and topics.
All evaluation methods require staff efforts and their time. School libraries are always short of staffing resources. This makes it more important to evaluate the current collection to ensure staff time is spent on the most needed areas. For example, starting an e-book collection enables the staff to move away from many tasks associated with printed book processing, such as covering the books, cataloguing and shelving the books. A lot of time can be saved which could be used to help students find the appropriate ebooks for their assignments and research. The benefit of using non-fiction ebooks and databases is that all topics can be searched and retrieved instantly. Compared to searching information from the printed/physical books, it is a much faster process. Appropriate evaluation methods should be employed to find out the usage of didferent types of e-resources so that the library can start an appropriate e-collection to better cater for students’ research and reading needs.
What are the current priority areas for evaluation in your school library collection?
The priority areas are the most important services which the school library is providing to its users i.e. research and reading. Teaching is another essential school library service which is becoming more important because of the increased need for information literacy and computer literacy in the 21st century education paradigm. Both information literacy and computer literacy are directly related to the use of library printed books and ebooks. The secondary school library has two main roles: support for research and reading (Cobett, 2012).
The priority areas for evaluation in the school library I am working at are the fiction collection and the graded reader collection. Those are the two most popular collections students are borrowing. These collections also help students to improve their literacy skills. 30% of the students in the school are from non-English speaking or refugee background. The graded reader collection is heavily used by the E/ALD classes which attend the library regularly to have literacy lessons and to borrow books.
The other priority area for evaluation is the non-fiction printed book collection. The collection isn’t up-to-date due to budget constraint. I need to identify the gaps of the collection and provide databases and ebook collections to fill the gaps. The provision of up-to-date non-fiction materials in the forms of print books or e-resources is critical for students’ research and subject study needs.
References:
Grigg, K. (2012). Assessment and evaluation of e-book collections. In R. Kaplan (Ed.), Building and Managing E-Book Collections (pp. 127-137). Neal-Schuman.
Cobett, T. (2012). E-books in a high school library – crushing academy. In R. Kaplan (Ed.), Building and Managing E-Book Collections (pp. 141-145). Neal-Schuman.