This is the fourth instalment of a week’s blogging about what I do day-to-day as Learning Resource Centre Manager at a UK secondary school.
Since I didn’t make any notes for today I am basing this post on Thursday’s tweets.
My first task for the day was to investigate transport to a school I will be visiting next Thursday. It will be an INSET day for my school so it has been organised for me to visit a school about 8.5 miles away to speak to and learn from the librarian there. I hope to be able to discuss behaviour management, teaching information literacy, collection development, communication with teachers, and more. Unfortunately the school is in a somewhat remote location so I could not get there by bus before lunchtime. I decided that I didn’t fancy cycling that distance before work and in the current weather and, since I don’t have a car, that taking a taxi is the best, albeit most extravagant option.
I spent some time today, as I do most days, covering some of the new books with sticky-backed plastic as a means of protecting them from wear and tear. This is a skill that I had no experience of beforehand so I have had to learn it on the job. I have noticeably improved in the past three months but I still have problems with air bubbles and creases, particularly on thin books. A few days ago I found this short tutorial at WikiHow, which teaches you to start at the spine, whereas I had been starting at one end. I have found this has improved my covering further but I still get more bubbles than I’d like. Does anyone have any good tips on how to apply the perfect cover?
On the ends of two sets of shelves I have produced displays of the books most borrowed by boys and by girls in the last month. To start with this seemed like a great way to showcase the LRC’s most popular books but a flaw I have found in the plan is that the most popular books tend to be on loan, and not available for displaying! Nonetheless I have persevered with it and often decide to put up those books that are slightly less popular but still borrowed fairly frequently. Today it was time to have a look at January’s statistics; it was clear that for girls, last month was Morpurgo month, with War Horse, Running Wild and Shadow all in the top ten. Boys, on the other hand, still cannot get enough of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, How to Train Your Dragon and Big Nate series.
A tweet from Helen today prompted me first to spend quite a while investigating Safer Internet Day (SID) and wondering how I might promote it within the LRC. Following that I began thinking about passing on information about SID to the teachers, which in turn led me to wonder whether it might be a nice idea to start producing a weekly or fortnightly newsletter for the school staff. My idea is that it might include information on awareness days; news from the LRC on new books, resources, displays etc.; information on resources that I feel would be useful in particular subjects. I feel that many teachers are unaware of my expertise and the resources that the LRC can offer, so I think a way of regularly grabbing their attention might be a worthwhile use of my time. Do you think this is a good idea? Do any other school or college librarians do anything similar for their staff?
Finally today I decided that I should do at least something to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, so I decided to create a small display of his novels, DVDs of those novels, and books about the author and his work, all headed by a poster I designed.
Those were the highlights of the fourth day of my Library Day in the Life week. It is probably clear that many of my days are similar to each other, so it would be tedious to recount everything I do each day. I hope the parts I have chosen continue to be of interest to those curious about the life of a school librarian.
