The Librain

The previous post “Missed opportunities or a chance to shine?” was about promoting ourselves – amongst other things. I just found this blog post today SL2.0 Suggestion Camp: Library Powered. It gives a really interesting and simple idea on how to market what you and your library can do for your school: why not make labels – the examples on the blog are for the US “Library Power” promotion – we could choose something else. These should then be stuck on everything that you send out to your school community, e.g. books, printed brochures, lists of weblinks etc. I have had compliments slips for years, but this label or sticky note idea is great.

I have been talking about this in school in the context of our VLE. When we are planning how we are going to develop pages for the LRC, I am trying to think about how I can put useful resources on for subject departments or pastoral teams, but “brand” them in some way so that staff and students know that we have done all of this work for them. Some teachers seemed to think that this was a bit strange, but then they usually have not had the kind of career that many of us have – i.e. very rarely does a Head of English, History, or whatever, have to justify their very existence in a school!

I have talked about and given presentations about this on numerous occasions. to put it simply:

If we don’t shout aloud about what we do, then no-one else will do it for us!

We are reaching, if we have not got there already, a critical point for school libraries and librarians. Some of us are feeling pessimistic about lack of development in the career of school librarian, others are maybe more hopeful.

For myself, I suppose that I am coming to the beginning of the end of my career – it depends how long I want to go on. But…I am still hugely excited and passionate about being a school librarian – really I should put School Librarian! The wonderful thing about this job is that it never stands still and it is, largely, what you make of it. When I started out, computers were a new novelty in schools. Now, I am interested in thinking about Web 2.0 can do for us and the teachers and students we work with. We must not let new opportunities slip through our fingers, but make time to learn about new technologies and ideas and think about how we can use them in the curriculum.

So, how can we make some of the Web 2.0 technologies work for us in terms of marketing. How are you developing pages on your VLE? Are you making a “library” section for it or are you putting resources into subject sections? it is difficult to share ideas as all of the systems seem to work differently, but perhaps we can pool some thoughts.

I have just spent an interesting couple of days on a course. The SLICT (Strategic Leadership of ICT) course is run by the National College for School Leadership and involved senior staff who lead on ICT in their schools (plus me). It felt a bit beyond my “comfort zone” at times, but was very interesting in terms of how we have allowed our skills to become invisible in many schools.

As my job title is rather obscure and does not reveal that I am a librarian, it was fun to see some of the participant’s faces when I told them my background. At first I was worried that I would be out of my depth with all of these senior staff, but then decided that I needed to promote our skills and roles in school. I may have expressed myself rather too forcefully at times, but I felt that I had to put our case.

So, I did make a few comments to the effect that as librarians we have, or could have, a major role in managing information beyond the traditional walls of our libraries. Some of the techies went on about metadata and filenames as if they had just invented the wheel. When I said that many schools already had information experts in post – they were surprised! Or they could have been irritated, of course.

But… many of the teachers there said that their librarians were not interested in developing the ICT side of their libraries. These senior managers saw their libraries as backwaters, places of silence, stuffy, book-based, not at all forward looking. Their librarians, in their eyes, were old-fashioned and stereotypical. Again, when I mentioned
that we are exploring Web 2.0 – they were surprised.

Anyway, we then went on school visits and, believe it or not, the school they sent me to had all-singing all-dancing ICT with a brilliant VLE – but NO LIBRARY!

So, what am I saying here? I feel that most people I meet are forward looking people. But how many school librarians out there are not doing the rest of us any favours. If this cross-section of senior leaders in schools had their first introduction to a mouthy, bolshie,
advocating, ICT-literate librarian when they met me – what can we all do to promote our role and services before ICT takes us in the wrong direction entirely – i.e. closure?