Thursday, February 23, 2012
Reflections on 2/17 class
The visit to Rachel's library at East Middle School in Plymouth was eye-opening. Yet, confirmed my previous experience at other school libraries- there really is no time to work on collection development. As we found with Rachel she is extremely committed to her students and gives her extra time to organize and work with student groups. I think this is unusual. She gives so much of her time to the school (student's especially) which is amazing and wonderful and a huge benefit for the school, but she seems to have very little time to take care of "library tasks". Now that she doesn't have a clerk this year- she must really feel like the collection is secondary to collaboration. This could be a trend for many libraries, less importance is placed on the physical books that are available at libraries as they become more obsolete. This makes me a little bit sad. Will the future be libraries without books? It might be easier to get rid of them then to properly maintain them, just because there is no time to do it. A poorly maintained collection results in an underutilized collection. Are collections not well maintained because they are underutilized? Are they underutilized because they are not well maintained? OR- are collections underutilized because students/schools/teachers are becoming more digital? What came first the chicken or the egg?
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Hmmm...which do you think is a better use of time? Extra curriculars or collection development? I think it might depend on what the students want/need. If there are avid readers at your school, then collection development might be best. If students are more interested in spending their free time in clubs with other students, then perhaps extra curriculars are best. Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteHonestly- I'm losing sleep at night over that. It makes me cringe to think that we might have the time to be everything to everybody. But, yes- I would think that we would HAVE to focus our efforts on what our users wants. Knowing that different users want different things from the media center. YIKES!
ReplyDeleteI think generally, extracurriculars would reach out to more people, and bring more students to the library, so I think I'd lean towards that. Then again, maybe you should do collection development first so that once they come, they stay?
ReplyDeleteyes, collection development cannot be the major role of a librarian in schools these days, so WHY do SLMers have to take cataloging and collection development, as if that's the bulk of what teacher-librarians do?
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