Reflections on LIBE 465

Overall, I would say that my participation in LIBE 465 was very good. I learned much from the readings, the activities, the assignments and from my fellow classmates in the Vista discussion forum. I found that I could easily relate the assignments to my current position as 0.40 FTE teacher-librarian in a K-7 French Immersion library. Each week, I completed an in-depth response to the weekly activity and posted it in the forum. I then took the time to respond to, on average, five other classmates’ comments in the Vista forum and then blogged about my learning and these discussions.

The themes that stood out for me in LIBE 465: Organization of Learning Resources were:  cataloguing, organization of online resources and organization of physical space. Access was a common thread in all of these areas.

When I learned how to write MARC records, I became more aware of how cataloguing is carried out in my school district and I learned how other school districts in BC deal with their cataloguing. I was surprised to find out that there were so many differences. In my school district, all cataloguing is done by two cataloguers at the district library. This means that any changes that I would like to make to MARC records would have to be emailed to the cataloguing department. The only tag that we are allowed to change, as teacher-librarians, is the spine label. I found out that in other school districts, it is the teacher-librarian and the library technicians that catalogue all new purchases.

Writing MARC records for a website, part of the requirement for the assignment of building a mini digital library, seemed unnecessary to me. This must be because I do not have the authority to add MARC records to our catalogue and also because of the fact that websites do not stay around forever. I can attest to this fact by the number of dead links that I have come across on websites over the years. I did learn from Keith and from Christal that some library systems do catalogue websites and that this service makes it easier for students to find quality online resources on particular topics. Instead of having to consult both the OPAC and a library website to access print and digital materials, the student just needs to conduct a search on OPAC to find both types of resources.

I enjoyed the lesson on school library websites and the Vista forum discussions that resulted from it. I have personally created a school library website, so I know the amount of time and energy that goes into building and maintaining one. As teacher-librarians, we all wonder if many students, staff or parents access our school library websites. When I look at the stats on my website, I can see that it is used fairly often. This is probably due to the fact that I have links on there for the different classes that I work with, and also due to the fact that I have included some fun websites that students probably access during their free time. I liked the idea that Kathy mentioned in the forum about creating a parent corner on the school library website and this is something that I plan to do in the future.

Kaija came up with a good question when we were discussing school library websites. She wondered if they were worth creating in a school like hers where over 500 students have limited access to 50 computers at school and probably have no access at home. In that situation, it would seem that a school library website would not get used. However, I think that it is still important to create one, in order to showcase what is going on in the library and to provide links to valuable resources for the classes that do come to the library.

Assignment #3, where we had to create a project that would improve access to our library was a wonderful exercise for me, as it pushed me to address a problem area in my library that had been largely ignored these past two years: the teacher resource section. I am in the process of carrying it out right now, and am looking forward to a time when the teachers will be able to more easily find good teacher resources and do so independently.

Through LIBE 465 and its readings, assignments and discussion forums, I have learned just how many different access points there are in a library.  I feel that I put a very good effort into my assignments and the discussions that took place in the Vista forums. I have learned the importance of writing a good MARC record, creating and maintaining a good school library website and organizing the print resources in a very user-friendly way.  Having the opportunity to hear what my classmates thought of certain subjects exposed me to new ideas and enriched my learning experience in this course.

Improving the physical space of my library

This week we were to post what we would change in our own libraries if we could.

I chose for Assignment #3 to improve the teacher resource section of my library. On the surface, this may look like a small change, but the benefits are huge, in my opinion. Due to limited time, I had not spent much energy on the teacher resource section up until this year.

After one year in my library (2 years ago) I embarked on a $6000.00 renovation where we added 20 computers to the library. This meant major weeding, moving bookshelves, building half walls and installing the 20 computers. You can see the results here.

After this major renovation, I felt that the main sections of my library were organized in a way that worked for us. This was true, except for the teacher resource section. This section was crammed full of a mixture of old and new resources (some of them not even in the system) and had poor signage. I found out that teachers also felt that this section was difficult to navigate and did not look through our teacher resources as a result of this. The whole renovation comes to just under $300.00 and is something that I am actually working on right now. You can see the outline of my project here.

It was interesting to see what other ideas my classmates had for their libraries. I really liked the following and can see myself adding these ideas to my "to-do list" for my library:

• improving signage in the non-fiction area
• adding sturdy bean bag chairs to the Easy section (would need a grant for this...)
• going all out with a theme (I liked Tamara's Narnia idea!) 

I'm constantly looking for ways to improve access to print and digital materials in my library and this course had encouraged me to make some positive changes.

The benefits of having a school library website...

This week our lesson was on library websites and the importance of these. I had forgotten about Joyce Valenza's wiki on all of the components you can include in library website. What a gem! I will continue to consult this resource in the future.

In my view, a school library website is very essential. It is a place to house or catalogue the resources that we offer through the school districts, in the form of online encyclopaedias and databases, and it is also a place where we can, as teacher-librarians, organize any excellent websites that we have found to support the students and staff in our schools.

However, my classmate, Kaija, made a good point. Why have a library website in a school of 500 with fewer than 50 computers and when these same students do not have access to computers at home? Good question! I still think that we need to have library websites as a way to organize any online resources we find and as a way to advocate and communicate with others what is going on in our libraries.

This is what I see as being important for an elementary library website:

• easy access to library OPAC and online subscription resources
• tabs for the different classes as a place to organize online resources specific to that class
• tabs for general websites that would be useful or fun for students
• tabs for tutorials to help students with their research on, for example: citing sources, creative commons
• attractive, uncluttered front page
• visible area for current events/activities happening in the library

 In the discussion forum, I learned about these ideas:

• creating a  parents' corner in the library website as a way to bring them into the library via resources they might use.
• adding links to online databases subscribed to by the school district to the Destiny homepage. I want to find out how to do this!

I developed a library website for my school last year. I went with the Blogger platform, because I wanted to post on a regular basis on what was happening in the library. Unfortunately, I have not posted regularly enough, but I plan on changing this. It is my goal to post once a week on my library website/blog. I felt that it was a very worthwhile endeavour to create the library website because it is a place that students can find the resources we are using for specific projects. I have also found some fun websites for the students and I know that they access these sites through the library website. Here is my library website.

My library's OPAC

In my school district we use Follett Destiny as our OPAC. I teach the students, as young as Grade 2, how to navigate the catalogue and where to find the books in the library. Some catch on very quickly and others require a lot of practice, but on the whole, they are pretty independent when it comes to finding books in the library.

As far as teachers go, they fall on the whole spectrum of independence. Some are very capable of finding their own books and others always request that I pull books for them on specific topics. I really should offer an orientation to OPAC to the teachers in order to get them all on the same page. What holds me back is the fact that I know some are very competent at using the system and I don’t want to bore them with this type of workshop. I know, though, that most would be surprised to see that they can access our school’s OPAC from home and that if I set them up with a username and password, they would be able to search our whole school district for materials that they need.

Giving one of these workshops is definitely something that I want to do in the near future. I plan on doing so on the day I show off the new organization of the teacher resource section of our library. You can see my plans here.

Last year, for about a month, we had access to a trial period of Follett Destiny’s Titlepeek. I happened to be teaching my “Battle of the Books” students Destiny Quest and we loved Titlepeek’s features. I was sorry to see it go. As a school district, we decided not to purchase a subscription; we are spending our money elsewhere, notably on encyclopedia and database subscriptions.

As a teacher-librarian, I find Follett Destiny’s interface for administrators to be difficult to use. Nothing about it is intuitive and I don’t find the “help” section very helpful. My library aide and I often shake our head at how things are organized in their system and we find that printing the simplest report can be quite time consuming. On the whole though, especially for our patrons, I find Follett Destiny, and Destiny Quest to be easy for students and teachers to use.

Improving the teacher resource section of L'École South Sahali

This presentation outlines the changes that I am putting in place to improve the teacher resource section at L'École South Sahali.


Although these changes may seem minor, this section was in desperate need of reinvention and reorganization. Because these improvements come in at limited costs, they can be carried out relatively quickly, making the teacher resource section more useful and accessible to teachers in a timely manner.

Other sources of cataloguing...

It is interesting to see, in this course, how different libraries can be even within the same province. You would think that the way they operate would be somewhat more uniform. In my district we have a central library that takes care of cataloguing services. This means that neither I, as TL, nor my library assistant need to spend time cataloguing new resources. This frees up my time to teach and my library assistant's time to carry out other administrative jobs.

It looks like Follett and ULS offer excellent cataloguing services at reasonable prices. Follett offers this service at 69 cents per book including: electronic catalog record, bar code label with protector, spine label, and mylar choice. It is only 11 cents per book if you are just looking for the electronic catalog record. ULS offers a basic MARC record for 49 cents per book.

It's good to know about these services even though I do not need them at this point in my library. It would definitely be worthwhile to buy a MARC record for less than a dollar. From my experience, creating MARC records takes time, and I know that my MARC records were not as accurate as they should have been.

From the discussion forum, I have learned that many of my classmates take advantage of these services in their districts. I know that before we amalgamated our library systems into one, with Follett Destiny in 2006, the teacher-librarians in our district were responsible for cataloguing. They would buy MARC records from jobbers in order to cut down on the time they spent on administrative duties.

Teaching the Dewey Decimal System

This week, it was all about learning about Dewey Decimal Classification. It's the way most of our elementary school libraries are organized, so it's important to know how it works. That's why we need to teach it to our students and sometimes even give a refresher course to a few teachers.

For our weekly assignment, we were to share an idea of how to teach the DDC. I've been teaching it to the students at my school for two years now, in my capacity as teacher-librarian, so I shared my process in the discussion forum. My approach focused mainly on giving a tour of the "information section", getting the students to find books on certain subjects and then having them look up and find books on subjects of their choice. Pretty straightforward, but with practice they learn how to navigate the library. The students always seem really excited when they have found the book they are looking for!

When they are able to do that, I might talk more about the different classifications. It's at this point that I like to show this cheesy rap video on Melvil Dewey.

My classmates came up with some really good ideas and shared them in the discussion forum. I liked Niki's idea of the "Big Race". She devised a game where students, working in small groups, are given 10 pictures of different items representing the different classes. Then within a certain allotted time, they must place these pictures in the right area of the library. They can browse the books as they go, and are allowed to go back and change the placement of their cards if there is still time remaining at the end. I really like this hands-on activity and I am going to try it out with my classes in the near future. I think that I'll need to make 10 different sets of picture cards so that the students don't just copy the other teams... ;)

Something that I like to point out when talking about DDC is that if a student knows the Dewey Decimal number of his/her favourite subject, then he/she can find a book on that subject in nearly every library in the world. To go along with this idea, I like to ask the students what their favourite Dewey Decimal number is and then I make them personalized name tags similar to this.

I get the students to write in their own name and their favourite Dewey Decimal number. You can make these personalized tags here.

It's been fun reading about all of my classmates ideas on how to teach DDC. I've been saving a lot of them in a file for future use!

Searching on Delicious...

            I set up a Delicious account two years ago for my 2^nd TL course through UBC. I was right away impressed with being able to save my bookmarks in a cloud. I have used Delicious many times when teaching in the library. It is easy to pull up my Delicious account and access websites and Youtube videos that I want to show my students. The funny thing is, I have never once searched on Delicious to find websites related to a topic that I am teaching or interested in. This week is the first time that I have tried that feature.  I decided to use the same topic that I chose for my mini digital library for this course. I found many of the same websites that I had come across when doing research for this library. But, the number of actual hits I got when I typed in “Ancient Egypt” was 3266.  I included the quotation marks to narrow down my search. Without the quotation marks the number of hits was 4720!

            This is the list of related tags that showed up: tags that other Delicious users have come up with on their own. 

 

In this environment, I don’t think that it is a real problem not having a consistent, controlled environment. The results retrieved for “Ancient Egypt” on the Delicious site are already much pared down from the results that would have resulted from a Google search. I did not expect to be presented with a short list of excellent web resources, so what I saw was a bonus. However, in a library situation, I would expect to find all of the available resources show up in my search for “Ancient Egypt” as I know that close attention should be paid to subject headings when cataloguing resources. And, I would expect these resources to be good resources since they were chosen by the teacher-librarian.

            I will continue to use Delicious to store my bookmarks to allow me easy access to them, wherever I am. However, I don’t know that I will conduct many searches on this social bookmarking site for topics of interest for research projects with my students. I much prefer specialized search engines such as DMOZ or Sweetsearch where I know that a website has been evaluated following certain criteria and will only show up in searches if deemed a quality website.

CIP and MARC records

The more I read and the more assignments that I complete for this course, the more I realize how many layers there are to MARC records. At first I found processing the information for writing the code for MARC records to be very overwhelming. Now, I only find it slightly overwhelming! ;)

It was beneficial to write the MARC records from scratch for a number of items while using examples from AMICUS and The Library of Congress to guide me. This week's lesson is helping me fine-tune my MARC records for my digital library project as I am becoming aware of tags that may have been omitted in actual MARC records that would be very beneficial to include in the MARC records that I am writing.

Being able to read about my classmates' experiences when comparing CIP to MARC records has brought up scenarios that I didn't encounter when examining the three books that I chose for Lesson 7 this week. My three books had relatively complete MARC records,  with complete summaries and appropriate subject headings. I did, however, come across a book that had no CIP data and I had never noticed that in a book before. I learned that this might have been because it was a "mass market paperback". From reading my classmates' postings, I saw that some of them had come across books where the MARC records did not contain summaries and had limited subject headings.

In my two years in the library I have learned that if relevant key words are not included in the summaries or in the subject headings, then it will be impossible to locate appropriate books for teachers for popular themes or topics. In the future, as I come across these omissions, I will note them and submit them to our cataloguing department in our district library, as all changes to MARC records must be made by them.

I am now off to improve the MARC records that I have written for the items in my digital library...

Creating MARC records...

This code is complicated... all the more obvious when you compare MARC records for the same book at two different libraries.

I looked at Adrienne Gear's Reading Power: Teaching Students to Think While They Read. I first looked at the MARC record at my elementary school and this is what I saw.

In order to access this MARC record, I  had to be signed in as an administrator. The MARC record was easy to understand, as textual signposts were used. When I looked at the MARC record for the same book at the Vancouver Public Library, this is what I saw. I was able to access the record as a guest.

 

As you can see, no textual signposts were used and symbols were used in place of spaces. I believe that this is because this is the actual code that the computer will read. The call numbers are different for each record and they are recorded in different tags. My school library's MARC record includes a summary, while VPL's does not. I wonder why that is, when there is clearly a summary in the catalogue record for this book in VPL. In fact, the description on the VPL catalogue record is much more detailed than the one at my school, giving a better idea of what the book is about.

There has been much talk in the discussion forum about how involved writing MARC records really is. I was overwhelmed at first (and still am a little...) by all the different tags, indicators and subtags. It seems that the position and choice of symbol for all of these is very important. The more that I write, the more that I understand what I am doing... it is a lot like learning a second language!

Image created at http://www.says-it.com/

Some of my classmates have noticed big discrepancies between the hard copy of the book and the MARC record for that same book. I have not noticed any problems in the books that I have chosen to look at in my own library for this course, but in the past I have noticed that call numbers might not match, or there might be typos in the summaries. One thing that I have come across in my two years in the library is that many books do not come up when doing a keyword search for a certain topic when it is obvious that that certain book fits that topic. I am wondering if adding subject headings to the MARC record could correct this problem.

Access points in our library catalogue in our ever-changing digital world

This past week we were to look at the catalog record for a number of items and check to see if and how the ISBD areas are organized. I chose fairly recent acquisitions to our library and, as such, the entries were quite uniform and complete.

I did notice, however, that the subject headings in the catalog record were few and far between for some items. The most complete list of subject headings was for the DVD: Noémie, le Secret coming in at 10 headings. The other items averaged only 3 subject headings each. I have found this low number of subject headings to be problematic in our library when I am searching for resources on different topics. I may know of a book that fits a certain theme but it will not come up when I do a keyword search for that particular theme.

Another discrepancy that I noticed was the lack of entry for "target audience" for quite of few of the items. This would be beneficial for a teacher, but may not have any bearing on a student's decision to go look for the book. In reading my classmates' postings in the discussion forum this week, I learned that a few others are also working with Follett Destiny and  that some of them have access to TitlePeek. Now, this is a feature that I know appeals to students with the option of seeing the actual book cover, table of contents, excerpts and even published reviews. Unfortunately, it comes as an additional cost to the Follett Destiny package and our district has opted to spend its money elsewhere (after polling all the teacher-librarians).

After spending a week looking at how search engines work, I found the catalog system to be quite inefficient. I have been disappointed when looking for books on different topics to have my searches come up with very few resources when I know that we have good books on the topic. I learned why this week when I saw how few subject headings that each book/resource actually had. I guess that this means that I need to go back and add appropriate subject headings to the different books/resources that support the topics and themes that are taught in the school. This is where the book/resource needs to have a digital record that includes a portion of the book in its record. That way, maybe key words or subject headings wouldn't have to be manually entered? I wonder what the future holds for catalog records...

From here:

 

 

 

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deborahfitchett/2970373235/

 

 

To who knows where?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/louish/5371825855/

Searching, searching, searching...

This week we were to look at how Google, Yahoo and DMOZ, or The Open Directory, three different search engines, determine relevancy rankings. The best thing that I got out of this exercise was the discovery of DMOZ. When I saw the name, Open Directory, it rang a bell, but I had never tried it. I was pleasantly surprised when the search words that I entered for each search engine turned up the best results in DMOZ.

"Ancient +Egypt +grade +7 +resources" yielded 20 educational sites in DMOZ, and in Google and Yahoo my search yielded mainly irrelevant results.  Because I used Boolean logic (adding "+") to narrow down my results, the number of websites was considerably lower than if I had simply typed in a question or a key phrase with none of the following symbols: +, -, "". 

In the discussion forum this week many of my classmates shared their frustration with the Metadata articles, but they also shared some kid-friendly search engines such as: Kids' Search Tools, Kids Click. I would also like to share SweetSearch as a student-friendly search engine. Joyce Valenza says this about Finding Dulcinea, which operates SweetSearch: "What does FindingDulcinea do right? It organizes. It evaluates. It creates context. It is conscious of design. It gets media."  

Try out your next query on SweetSearch and let me know what you think! 

If you are in a French Immersion school/library and are looking for a good French language search engine, try out La Toile du Québec. I've gotten good results for my searches with this search engine.

What is Metadata?

I knew nothing about Metadata coming into this lesson and at first I found it all quite confusing. I now have a general idea of what it is, but it will require a re-reading of the articles to become more clear on all of its purposes. I think that what was initially holding me back from understanding the intricacies of Metadata was me not being able to see its relevance for digital resources in the library. When I think of digital resources, I think of , first of all, websites that will help students with their learning and research. It has been my experience over the years that when I find a list of websites on a particular topic there are often a few, if not many, dead links. This experience underlines that fact that websites are impermanent. It is for this reason that I don't see the need to spend a lot of time creating Metadata for a list of great websites that the students can use. Why go to all that trouble when the website could no longer be accessible by that URL in who knows how little time?

However, after reading one of Keith's posts where he explains how he writes Metadata on digital resources to include in the library catalogue, I can see how this would be helpful for the students. If a student is looking up information on Ancient Egypt, a list of books and a website or an online database will show up in his/her search results. Having the digital resources listed in the library catalogue will eliminate the additional step of checking out the library website for a list of websites provided by the teacher-librarian.

Something else that I realized when reading about Metadata, in the lesson material for the course, was that Metadata can be as simple or as complex as you would like it to be. It is simply another way to organize resources to make them easier for patrons to find.

I get it!!

Access

There was a lot of lively discussion this past week for Lesson 2 on "Access". We were asked to reflect on "access" related to the library, how our library dealt with it and how committed we were to "access".

Below is a shortened list of a teacher-librarian's responsibilities included in Lesson 2 of LIBE 465:

1) Acquisition

• budgeting
• evaluation
• selection
• purchasing

2) Organization and maintenance

• cataloguing and processing
• analyzing the collection
• weeding

3) Circulation

• automation
• access (including location of resources)
• security

As Elizabeth wrote in her comment for this week's lesson all of these duties affect students' and teachers' access to the library. My comment was, "Access is of utmost importance to a library. For without access, what is the purpose of the library? Cutting back on time given to Teacher-Librarians most definitely has an impact on access to resources. Although the teachers and students may be able to enter the library and ultimately consult and borrow books, they may not be fully aware of what the library has to offer without the guidance of a Teacher-Librarian." Both my comments and Elizabeth's comments focus on the duties of the teacher-librarian. Elizabeth talks about the behind-the-scenes duties and my comment is more about the face-to-face duties. Both are equally important. If you don't have an excellent, well organized collection that meets the needs of the patrons, then the patrons will not come to the library. But, if you don't have a teacher-librarian in the library, then the patrons won't be able to access the excellent collection.

This week, I also got into some discussion about having Young Adult fiction in an elementary library. This relates to "access" as well, in two ways. One, we want the library to have materials that will meet the needs of the upper intermediate students. For, if they don't find books of interest to them in the library, then they may not want to visit. Secondly, we don't want the primary students to have unlimited access to books meant for older students. This type of access is hard to control in my library as it is an open library that anyone can enter at anytime and our library is only staffed the equivalent of 3 days a week. I did not find a suitable solution to my problem, even after much discussion, so I will not be having a Young Adult shelf in my library in the near future. I am open to ideas on how to solve this problem and will continue to look for a solution. Do you have any ideas?

In closing, I am pleased to say that I have the problem where more classes want to work with me in the library than I have time for. Sounds like a funny problem, but maybe I could add this example to some advocacy projects geared to increase TL staffing in my library...

(I created this image on Image Chef.)

Organizing the Library

I am starting my 3rd year as teacher-librarian in a French Immersion school in Kamloops and am working on my 9th course toward my teacher-librarian diploma program. It seems like just yesterday that I was starting my coursework after having been away from university for almost 20 years.

These courses has been the best professional development for me, and LIBE 465 promises to be no exception. It is funny how the TL courses that I take each semester seem to meet my exact needs in the area that I would like to focus on and improve in my library. This semester it will be to have my teacher resources more easily accessible and to make the collection, as a whole, more appealing to students. I'm not sure what this will look like for my assignments, but I am sure that I will soon come up with a specific idea for these.

Over the summer I had the time to play a little with Twitter, something that I signed up for in my LIBE 477 class. I signed up just to find out what it was about, never intending to tweet, only intending to follow. But as with all conversations, one-sided ones are pretty boring. I'm tweeting a little now and I see that my tweets open up new doors, especially in the area of professional development. It was by tweeting that I found out about Shannon Miller, a teacher-librarian from Van Meter, Iowa. This summer she decided to turn the organization of her library upside down. She ditched the dewey decimal system and went to a "bookstore" model. You can read more about it here.

I brought this up here, because it is about library organization and I have been wondering about how to make the collection more accessible and inviting to the students. Maybe this would work... it would take a lot of re-organizing and a big leap of faith.

What do you think of this idea?

Before I go, I want to leave you with this funny video, that I also found thanks to Twitter!