If I decide that this is the way to go, then I will spend more time on it:

The site is at: http://library-online.org.uk/

I have chosen a hosted WordPress site and used a theme that I like a lot. The theme colour goes well with the school logo and colours. Also I can add widgets with lots of lovely Web2.0 stuff.

The idea is to have something that looks professional, can take links and resources to help students and staff and can be editing very quickly and easily from any computer.

I also want a bit of a Wow Factor!

Does this work?

New website for a new library!

I have looked at and read about lots of CMSs, including Drupal and Joomla! But I don’t think that my technical skills are really up to learning these at the moment. So, as I am reasonably comfortable with WordPress, I sorted myself out a new blog. Then I read some more, posted on some more forums and nings and decided to try a hosted Wordpress blog instead. I only set it up today and there are a few teething problems already. But, I will give it a go and post again when I have some news…

Non-blogging with a blog!

… it is fun finding themes and other stuff to put on the blog. I am trying to find ideas as to how to use it both for news and in a non-blog way. There are a lot of ideas out there…

…let’s see if it works!

… a calm and happy Librain

Well, The Librain is a lot slimmer and younger than her creator! The little dragon is her daemon.

This is how I feel now…

… a really ANGRY Librain

So that is all I am worth to teachers after so many years - zilch!

• Why did I stay up late at night, working to finish things for them for the next day?
• Why did I let them book in at the last minute?
• Why did I try to learn cutting edge stuff to help them?
• Why did I write teaching materials and get them ready for observed lessons, when I had other things I needed to do?
• Why do I feel so unappreciated?

I did it for the kids…

… and for the kids I will do it again…

I set up this blog to enable me to track the developments of the LRC as we moved into the Web 2.0 and School Library 2.0 era. So, I now need to think how I am going to use the blog in my new role.

So - what am I going to be doing? From September, I will be The Librarian (love the title!) in a school where the Library (love the name!) needs refurbishment. Because I will be working on my own, I will be going back to basics again. The refurb will take place in the summer of 2009, so I have a whole year to help the school plan. In the meantime, I will have to do the following (not necessarily in this order):

• Assess the current state of the Library to get the base-line.
• Learn an unfamiliar LMS.
• Stock-take and weed the current stock.
• Clean, cover, label and re-catalogue the stock that is staying.
• Put in place basic library management procedures.
• Get out and meet the staff and pupils.
• Get the staff and pupils excited about the prospect of a new Library.
• Put in monitoring and evaluation systems.

… and so on.

So, will my current interests in the development of technologies go on hold for the time being?

I don’t think so. Because the stock appears to be unable to meet the needs of staff and pupils, I can see that I will be using ICT in, hopefully, innovative ways to give the school a library service that they have not had before.

I need to make an impact, to show the school community just what a Librarian can offer.

Warch this space…

But… I was beginning to see how we might use a more collaborative way of working - difficult for me as I have been called a control-freak in the past!

So… how could we promote all of these disparate things to the school community? We already called our website “LRC Online” as this mirrored the school website. It had its own logo.

Simple thing really - we have now called everything our “LRC Online Services”.

LRC Online Website
LRC Online Catalogue - coming soon
LRC Online Blog - a basic blog made to insert news into the other services
LRC Online Portal Pages - only for the school community
LRC Online Wiki

… and so on, as we add more new things in the future.

We have now started promoting these services to the school with the logo, “LRC Online Services” and the strapline:

“Bringing the LRC to you!”

Cheesy? Maybe - but it emphasises the idea that we are working outside our physical enviroment. Not rocket science, but worth trying.

This is what the top part of our Portal Page looks like:

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.

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!

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?

And there is so much to think about!

So, today’s top thing is:

What is the role of the Librarian in today’s school library and maybe tomorrow’s?

I read this post “So just what should librarians be teaching?” from Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog. It is interesting to see how he discusses the different roles of the school library:

1. Reading Skills
2. Information Literacy
3. Technology Skills

He tries to work out the different balances that could be made between these areas. The diagrams clearly show his ideas.

In the UK, most school library staff do not have teaching qualifications, although most of us do teach. We may also think in different ways to the teacher-librarians in the US, Australia, etc. However, I have, over the years, tried to think more and more as an educator. I do try to balance out these differing roles - with varying degrees of success.

Some challenges are brought about by my own expertise/lack of expertise or my own skills and preferences - for example: I feel confident when helping students to choose books and have created a reading programme for our students, but would be less confident in actually teaching reading. I am happy to listen to students read and love “waving and raving”, but would not begin to know how to teach phonics. Is the teaching of reading the role of the school librarian? I am not sure.

I am looking more and more at how we can use the data held on the school systems such as SIMs in conjunction with our own Library Management Systems. How can we use our students’ reading levels to help them better? Do our schools even test students regularly so that we can measure our contribution to their reading development?

Similarly - I am happy to work with teachers on teaching research skills - particularly planning the search, thinking around the subject, developing keywords, using search engines and so on. I would not be so confident in teaching students how to write up their research, although I would like to get more involved and I would try! What is the role of the school librarian in the later stages of research? I have been sent a link on this and will return to this issue at another time. Also, I know many wonderful librarians who take Information Literacy Skills far beyond basic research - how many of us are confident that we can teach such things as “Critical Thinking” or group problem-solving and where do we go to learn how?

When I took up my present post nearly nine years ago, my ICT skills were definitely more advanced than most teachers and students. I still try to keep up with new developments and find this a very rewarding and exciting area of the job. Now, I think that more teachers are confident with their skills and many students are also. (Although many clearly are not or are over-confident!). Much of the teaching that I do in this area is on an informal ad-hoc level, rather than part of a formal teaching situation. I am learning about new technologies and am using them for my own personal and professional purposes. But, I would like more opportunities to use them with students. Where so we find the oportunities to try out new ideas?

A lot of questions here - do any of you have answers?

I like to think that I have always had a strong vision for what I think a school library should look like. But we are reaching a period of such rapid change. I want to think this year about where I am heading as a school librarian and what I think our LRC will look like in five years time. Is this a tall order? It may be, but I think that it is necessary or I will lose my “golden compass”!

Many years ago, in my first school job - 1982! - I made a display called “Information Explosion”. I illustrated it with newspaper headlines cut out and radiating outwards. This seems so funny now when I think that I did not even have a computer in the library at the time!

So, what can we read to help us think ahead?

The papers over the last couple of days have been full of articles about the “Google Generation” and how academics are worried about students’ information-seeking behaviours.

This one in the Guardian Education section on the 15th January - Intellectual Literacy Hour - talks about a research report which is a must-read for any school librarian:

University College London (UCL) CIBER group.(2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future. London: University College London. CIBER Briefing paper; 9. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

This is the press release on the JISC website:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/01/googlegen.aspx

I have started to read the report and the following really struck a chord with me ( a precis of page 12):

“Themes for how children and young people use the internet:

• the information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying  problems

Haven’t all of us who have been working in school libraries for some years been talking about this for ages? Students know how to play games and make lovely PowerPoints - but actually write something in their own words?

• internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority

Speed is the key here, I think and a lack of understanding about authority. This is not much better for some of our staff colleagues - how many teachers recommend students to use Wikipedia, but do not teach them how to use it properly or the check with other sources?

• young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies
• as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective

How many school librarians get the opportunity to actually teach this? Many of us do, but maybe not often enough or not to an entire year group.

• faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them

This is despite all of the ICT teaching that they are apparently getting in schools. Is this not the “meat and drink” of a school librarian’s job?

… However, the ubiquitous use of highly branded search engines raises other issues:

• young people have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of networked resources from different providers
• as a result, the search engine, be that Yahoo or Google, becomes the primary brand that they associate with the internet

I recognise this easily - many students cite “Google” in bibliographies (if I can get them to make one).

• many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if simplistic solution, for their study needs

This is also somehting that I am thinking hard about. I spend ages making lists of evaluated web resources either on our VLE, the LRC’s website or in Del.icio.us. But then I turn around and see students back on Google!

Anyway - this post has been very long and I had better do some more reading from the report before I post any more thoughts…