The Librain

For a variety of reasons, including family stuff, I had to spend the Easter Holidays working at home. I decided to really think about all of the “webbie” things that I am doing:

Strongest Links Website - I think that I want to continue this for a while longer as I believe that it is still useful to school librarians. However, I can only edit this from home in my own time and there is not much of that to spare. It will go on a bit longer. After the CILIP Summit, they are apparently going to create a resource on their website - so where does that leave Strongest Links?

Strongest Links Wiki - I started this as a response to people on SLN asking for a collaborative space to share resources and ideas that came up repeatedly on SLN. I had no intention of doing all of it myself. Just creating the structure for others to fill. But there are few people contributing - has it “died the death” and should I delete it?

The Librain Blog- I enjoy writing this, although I don’t post as often as I should. Some librarian bloggers are really prolific. But I need to think about what I want to say, or else I will end up repeating myself too often. It is a good way of clarifying my own thoughts, though.

School website - I now edit this and try to keep up with things, adding news and tweaking pages as necessary. We have decided to make it an online prospectus and move all resources on to our Portal, which has a secure log-in.

LRC Online Website- I spent a lot of time rationalising what is on this and updating things to include the Web 2.0 stuff that I am doing - e.g. del.icio.us links etc. It is now a bit more streamlined and should be easier to maintain. I would be reluctant to take it down as it represents many years of work from the time when I was learning how to put things on our intranet.

LRC Online Blog- I have made a very basic blog, hosted with the same company as the LRC website. This enables me, using RSS feeds, to put news into the LRC website and the LRC’s Portal pages by only editing one site instead of several. Neat!

LRC Online Portal Pages - I am trying to cross-link everything that I do so that however a student or member of staff finds the LRC (Portal, LRC Website, School Website) they can easily navigate to the resources that they need.

LRC Online Wiki - I have started using a wiki with some students - mentioned in the previous post. This is going quite well so far, but it is very early days as yet and I will devote a post to it later on, when I can see some results.

LRC Online OPAC - we are finally about to install Heritage Online so that we can have our OPAC accessible from the web. This should enable us to reach out to the school community.

I am also playing around with Pageflakes, creating a really useful homepage for myself with RSS feeds about my personal and professional interests. Thinking about how useful this could be, I then tried to build  some Pageflakes pages that could be used with teachers. Although I have since found that a teacher has used NetVibes to make something very similar. I will think a bit more about whether it is worth spedning the time on this before I go much further. Some colleagues have also sent me “flakes” to add to the page, so we could work on this collaboratively, then use the pages for our own schools.

Well, I am having such a lot of fun! In fact I don’t think that I have enjoyed myself so much (in the professional sense, of course) since the early days of learning about computers. I remember the awed fascination that I had back in the early 80s for things like Prestel and the Domesday Project. It seemed amazing that we could “talk” to people around the world on our monitors and “walk” around rooms in 3D.

So… what has got me so excited? Well, a number of things.

1. Writing a collaborative document on Google Docs. Some of us are going to the CILIP Summit on School Libraries next week. So, I thought that it would be a good thing for the school librarians to share thoughts and ideas. We could have done this by email, but I thought that it would be much more interesting to do it by adding to a joint document. And so it has proved. I might be a bit sad, but it seems so clever and fascinating to edit the words whilst watching other people’s thought appear on the screen.
2. Playing around with our college portal. We are using RM’s Kaleidos and I have been trying for some time to think about how I could use it to help students access not only our resources in the LRC but link these with materials and information in the wider sense. I am only just beginning, but I was trying to find ways to attract students to the LRC’s pages. Some of the answer might be using widgets. So I have had a look at Google Gadgets - BTW this is not an extended advert for Google! What I have done is put widgets for football and cricket scores on the LRC page, works of art on the LRC’s Art page, RSS feeds about the latest Science news on the LRC’s Science page and a virtual aquarium on the LRC Student Helper page (this is the most popular). Each page that I am making to support subjects has appropriate widgets - it is such fun selecting them. I now want to explore what else I can add to get the college community to look at our pages. This is not silly stuff, apart from the aquarium and even that could be said to be soothing, I have a serious plan behind this.
3. Thinking about the balance between our website and the portal. I have said quite a bit about this already. But when it is so easy to edit a blog, wiki or the portal (less so), why am I continuing with our LRC website? Particularly when I cannot find enough time to develop it properly? I will continue to think about this over the Spring and Summer. I can quickly add links that I want to bookmark to Del.icio.us - but do I have a limit on this? Not sure.
4. Trying out a wiki with students. I have finally found the right teacher and the right (I hope) group to try this with. It is such a new idea in our college. But I hope that it will motivate our students better than doing individual essays. We are trying to get them working in teams with a mildly competitive ethos. We award each team points for how well they have worked during each lesson and I have made a league table on the wiki. Also, I now have a really good way of encouraging original writing rather than cut-and-paste and proper citation and referencing. As their work will be “published”, they have to do it properly. Well, let’s see how it goes.

Let the fun begin!

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?

I gave a presentation on the future of school libraries to two conferences in Reading and Leeds. This was my first attempt to put together some thoughts about where we might be going and how we can use Web 2.0 in our work. It took a lot of thinking and research (using the blogs listed on this site), to create the presentation. It will be interesting to see what kind of feedback I might get.

How many school librarians run their school websites - I mean the official ones rather than their own library site? I am starting to look at ours with a view to revising and re-organising it.

So, what is the best way to use a school site? In England, we are now expected to develop learning platforms/VLEs. These will give students a flavour of the social networking sites that they inhabit, but with the control of adults. There are interesting from the school librarian’s point of view and many of us are beginning to use them to work beyond the walls of our libraries. I am wondering if we might feel a little constrained by these in the way that we want to develop our use of Web 2.0 technologies. Already, many of the filtering systems used by our schools block many useful sites - especially blogging.

Anyway, back to the school official site. Schools use these for many purposes. We are going to think about developing ours mainly as a marketing tool and using the VLE for the rest. It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop.