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.)