Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Today was spent at a new middle school and the meeting was targeted to middle school media specialists.  I got to meet them all, and actually thought the group was very nice and helpful. I wish I had thought to call or contact any of them earlier b/c some of my questions could have been answered easily with just a couple of clicks on the district’s website. Just about anything and everything I need to know is there.  WOW. I am embarrassed to admit that  had not even thought to look there.

The media coordinator has thre goals for the upcoming schoolyear, and these goals show me that he has cast a vision for what the media progrmas are to be about.  They are as follows:

1. The SLIS will actively encourage  collaborative planning through participation in teacher planning sessions, providing access to information and resources to teachers, and instruction that supports this collaboration.
2. The SLIS will serve as a mentor for all school personnel in the appropriate use of information technology.
3. The SLIS will provide an up-to-date and accurate OPAC for their patrons.

The goals excite me too.  I am well on my way to providing an up-to-date collection as i weed the out dated books. With an average age right now of 1988, I only need to lose roughly fifteen years. Piece of cake–NOT.  But I do see a light at the end of the tunnel. i know that I have approximately 2000 of the 11.000 books that have a copyright date older than 1985. Perhaps seriously evaluating these books (and hopefully weeding out the vast majority) will give me five of my needed fifteen years.  I hope–anyway.  We shall see.  I have a cordless remote scanner, and according to the fellow media specialists of the district, this will be a piece of cake to batch delete. I can’t wait to take a picture of the piles and piles of books to be removed.  It is unbelievable.  But I was warned today about a guide coming down from ur state department of education.  SACS calls for school libraries to offer ten books per student enrollee.  Our liaison has written a guide that is more rigorous than SACS, and the speculation is that to be deemed an expmplary library in SC, you have to have up-to-date books in all the areas of the library, and offer 14 books per student.  Our enrollment they say is going up.  Last figure I heard was about 650 students. Using the 14 books as a rule of thumb, that means I need to have 9,100 books.  That figure means I can get rid of 1900 books.  That places me just 100 shy of what I would like to get rid of. But hopefully with the budget (which I have not been told about yet) I will be able to rid the library of 200 books.

I am concerned too with the fictions section, as in a superficial look, there are MANY books that have duplicate titles. Some are 2-3  in number, but there are some that are also fifteen or more in number, almost like a class set that perhaps is no longer used.  My attention to the fiction area may have to wait for next year, though for the life of me I don’t know why this library has so many sets of the same title.  And with the tools available electronically to check for usage and getting statistics on titles in the collection, I’m sure many of these books have little to no circulations.  I will try to get some of these books out too.

Hopefully my budget will enugh to pour some updated titles in the collection.  The media coordinator shared that most of the principals hve given their librries $10.00 per student. So that excites me.  But of course he did say there were a few who got less, and even a couple who got significantly less. He is in talks with another stakeholder at the district level that may have leverage, and I get the impression those will be getting additional funding form the district level, but tht is just an impression, and nothing stated exactly.

That’s all the thoughts for day 4.