Day 18: A Slow, Stormy Day

To be honest, we haven't had any slow days in the library during my practicum experience. My first week was back from a break and almost all the students came through the library, the second finished with Battle of the Books, and the third prepared for the Book Fair. This week, the only big event is Spring Break next week! Today was also a big storm day in Georgia and South Carolina, so many students were checked out of school early. Spring Break plus few students made for my first slow day in the library!

This meant it was a perfect week to do the inventory/weeding/ordering and compare my SLIS 720 Program Analysis project with Mrs. Edgerton. This is what we focused on today. We looked into the End of Year report that Cindy makes for the principal each year to see what highlights Mrs. Henderson looks for. The report predominately focused on finances, Accelerated Reader, and circulation numbers.

I also used TitleWave online and the ABDO paper catalog to finish the development of the biographies section. We focused our order on three things: low level texts, Explorers/Revolutionary War/Civil War curriculum content, and current pop icons.

TitleWave has an "advanced search" option that we set for K-3 levels, published after 2014, and included at least two reviews. I had to manipulate the search terms a bit to garner enough new results that weren't already part of the collection at Ravenel. I also had to include levels 4-6 to browse further texts. Especially as the fourth grade students research for a wax museum of Revolutionary War people, some of the texts in the higher range would still be appropriate. Once I searched all three topics, 12 books could be added to the collection.

The ABDO catalog organized texts by content, then by series. Unfortunately, the page organization was not organized by age range, but still by series. Essentially, each spread was on one topic (i.e. athletes, musicians, presidents, etc), but the pages alternated or sometimes randomly listed grade level appropriateness. It was a little challenging to read through the catalog this way, so we had to be extra attentive when looking at which books to order.

Both methods were fairly easy and seem to offer some excellent biography sections to add to the library.

Day 17: Analyzing and Spreadsheets

Today was a paper-pushing kind of day. It is one of the things I both dread and love in the same breath: I love the organization and productivity and mental focus you can achieve in paperwork, but only if the tasks serve a relevant and useful purpose. Thankfully, today was just the kind of desk work I love!

Yesterday, I began inventory on the biographies, as my assigned part of the collection to weed. I have already looked at a specific section of the biographies with my SLIS 720 Collection Analysis assignment, but this week's task spans the entirety of Ravenel's biography collection.

Today, we actually weeded about 100 books! It started out with a "Shelf List" generated by the Follett software. Cindy printed out a list of the whole collection and brought me a highlighter. I kindly (I hope) asked if the program generated Excel spreadsheets as this data could be manipulated easily to narrow the around 1,400 titles to just the potentially outdated or non-useful texts. Thankfully, the program does, so I got to work. Using the conditional formatting tool, I first labelled texts according to dates established by Karen R Lowe's weeding formulas, the "queen of weeding" according to Cindy. Then, I conditionally formatted texts with less than two circulations in the last five years. I had to play around with the sorting filters until I was content that both the oldest and least used texts were in the top 10% of my spreadsheet. From there, it was much more hands-on and slightly more tedious. I first looked at the 0-checkout texts in the "red" and "orange" date ranges ("weed"/"aging") and entered the barcodes into Destiny to see how many lifetime checkouts the text had and when the text was added to the collection.

Interesting trends started to happen. Almost all of the texts that were both old and unused were entered into the collection on April 28, 2006! I asked Toni what might have caused this, as she and Cindy were in charge of the library at that time. Toni remembered that the office and the side storage room were FULL of boxes and boxes of books that had never been added to the collection by the previous librarian. 😞 The timeline both she and Cindy remembered seemed to fit with this date in the catalog. Evidently, these texts were unnecessary purchases (donations?) to the collection that were never offered nor advertised as part of the collection. This made pulling texts fairly easy for several of the books to be weeded. The second trend we noticed were for pop icons or sport athletes that were popular for a short time and were no longer relevant to today's children. For one collection of texts published in the 1990s, we asked a handful of students, "Do you know ___?" Some names like Enrique Iglesias, Brandy, N*Sync, Hillary Duff, etc, were named. Besides blank looks, shaken heads, and "no"s, one student said, "These aren't the people we study! I know about James Madison!" 😆😆😆 Those got weeded as well.

The last task we completed was the actual pulling of the books and removing from the collection. After I collected the books onto a cart, Cindy took a last thumb through each of the texts, determining if the text was still valuable despite the catalog (perhaps teachers use the book or she used the book in the library) and to determine potential books to send to other teachers or areas of the school that would find more use for the texts (old art or music books, role models for guidance, etc). All but three were determined "weed" material. The actual process of removing these texts from the catalog was as simple as a scan! Tomorrow we begin the process of pulling barcodes and other identifiers from the books themselves before looking at how to improve the biography collection moving forward.

Day 16: Puzzle Pieces, Teaching Destiny, and Biography Inventory

I am so excited and sad to start this final week of my internship! I can’t wait to receive the degree and be available to take a position in a school library near me.

Today started with a reading advisory project that is being sponsored by the art teacher and an initiative unique to Ravenel: Artists on the Green. This program brings in local artisans to share their craft and work with the students, organized through the art teacher. She asked each of the teachers to create a giant puzzle piece to represent their area of the school. For the library, we decided to use some book jackets that were sent by the distributors to create a collage of reading and new titles. At first, I was super hesitant to cut up the covers but chose to recognize that the book jackets would have been destroyed easily over a few circulations and the books themselves already have versions of these covers embedded in their hard back, shelf editions. Once I got over the initial “heartbreak” and my own nerves about creating the piece, I actually really enjoyed picking out some of the fun and engaging artwork from the book jackets’ front and back covers and inner flaps. To maximize the amount of material on the puzzle piece, I used the spine labels for the book titles and authors/illustrators to add reference in minimal space. Overall, the collage turned into a modge-podge of fiction texts that spans all elementary grade levels. I titled the piece “Characters Around” as the cover art focuses largely on a diverse set of character illustrations.

As I was finishing this project, one of the first grade classes came for library time. Cindy had planned a lesson using the school’s new Chromebooks to teach these students how to use the online Destiny catalog. I was glad to see that the lesson was structured much like my own collaborative lesson with the 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th graders. The first half of the lesson was largely focused on learning terminology and location of buttons on the catalog screen. Then, Cindy used some interactive, formative questions to test if the students had paid attention to which search button they should use (keyword, title, author, series) and what section the call number belonged to (easy, fiction, biography, nonfiction). Lastly, the students worked with a partner to find four call numbers that Cindy had specified on a small worksheet addressing the four search functions they had just learned from the catalog.

Overall, I thought the lesson went as smoothly as possible for students both new to Chromebooks and still developing skills like spelling and reading. Thankfully, my presence as well as the teacher returning a bit early to the library made troubleshooting and answering student questions much much easier. I think I would keep this in mind when I teach the younger-grade students something complex or foreign to the students: enlist help! Maybe even pairing upper-grade students during these lessons would be helpful to the students. I have seen older students help younger students with finding a book in just this way. It would be really cool and rewarding to the older students to mentor the younger students as a potential program for my own library. Even still, the lesson as is seemed to make sense to the students.

Lastly, I started conducting inventory on the biography section of the collection. This is the section that Cindy wants me to weed and analyze for assessment and potential growth. The inventory was super easy to set up. Follett has a program feature in Back Office that allows you to set parameters for the section. From there, I went to the biography section with a laptop and a hand scanner to scan the books present. Boom! That’s it (for today)! I had to put on some latex gloves after the first row of the first shelf as my fingers were becoming caked with grime from the books themselves. I knew that it would be easier and better for my hands if I finished the collection scanning with gloves. Though there were students participating in circulation, I was fortunate enough to just focus on inventory because Cindy and Toni were present to run the standard library functions. I imagine that, again, volunteers could be beneficial to this process or designated time would need to be assigned to complete the inventory process most efficiently in my own library.

While weeding, a few books immediately stood out to me as potential weeding material: some old and yellowing texts and some outdated “pop icons” (like Enrique Iglesias and N*sync). I went ahead and pulled those aside as I will be working on weeding later this week. Otherwise, there were only a few titles out of place (Es in the Bs) and a few missing over-barcode tape strips. The real problem came when I had less than ten books left in the section. Whoosh! The power dropped due to heavy rains and winds in the area. In fact, the power is still out as I type into Word on a laptop—how ironic! The power just resumed as I typed that sentence! Being the end of the day, though, and with the network still down, I will start my inventory analysis tomorrow, looking to weed and to fill any curriculum gaps in the biography section. We did get to hunker down in the non-lit, no-windows closet for a while and generally relax as all technology and power halted projects needing completion. Thankfully, this laptop was available to continue working on my Practicum Learning Outcomes and this reflection.

Overall, I’ve learned that flexibility is the key to success in this environment: especially on crazy, unexpected days like today!