The Librain

Well, this post is following fast on the heels of the last one! I have been wandering around the school library blogosphere today reading extremely thought-provoking posts and comments about an issue that affects us all. So, the thought for today is:

How do we convince our school community that we have so much to offer? Have we allowed the development of technologies to marginalise libraries and librarians?

This quote is from Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog:

If we take an honest look at what we as librarians have done since technology has come into our buildings, as painful as it is to say, we have dropped the ball – big time. Why?

Why have school librarians not had a bigger impact on information and tech literacy integration?

This discussion is going on all around the blogs. Also have a look at Joyce Valenza’s Neverendingsearch Blog on the same issue.

There are several reasons mentioned why we may not have the impact that we would like. Our issues in the UK are even more serious, I would suggest, than those in the US - so I will add in a few of my own.

1. Sexism - most school library staff are women - most school managers are men.
2. Stereotypes - what is the image of librarians in our culture? Say no more…
3. Schitzophrenia and internal battling. What are we for - reading, information literacy, other stuff? How are we trained and qualified, or not?
4. Strategy - because we usually work alone we tend to get bogged down with the small stuff - working with individual teachers rather than lifting our eyes to the bigger picture. Do we think in a long-term strategic way, or are we running around worrying about how tidy our shelves are?
5. Respect - without school library standards in the UK, we struggle with the widely varying quality of school libraries and librarians. Teachers, in many cases, do not know what a school librarian can do for them, unless they have been fortunate enough to meet a good one. They come to us with often very low expectations of our service. We are not good at telling them what they should expect from us. We are often even worse at telling management what we do!
6. Lack of vision and direction - most of us work alone and largely motivate ourselves. Who is there to give us any direction? Schools Library Services? CILIP?? The SLA? We end up developing a vision for ourselves - often helped by our own informal networks rather than any input from professional organisations.
7. Stereotypes again - what is the view of libraries in our culture? Will the library as a book space lead us to a dead-end? As Joyce says under her headline of “Ubiquity”, we need to think and reach out beyond the physical space of the library - “Library must find a way to be a window on a students’ desktops.”
8. Image (Joyce says Brand - just as good). I now work with an assistant who has come to me from a retail environment. She thinks about promotion and branding all of the time - it is in her blood. She has got me thinking about this more as well - how to we create a unique service that is so central to the school that they cannot imagine being without it and us? How do we make sure that what we do is embedded in the school culture? Read what Joyce says about this as she puts it more fluently than I could.

We know that we have so much to offer in our schools. We know that we have a unique contribution to make that could really help our students raise their achievement.

So, it is our fault that we have not made enough impact?

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?