What does a good library tell you about a school?

A post from Doug Johnson on his Blue Skunk blog, shared on schoolibs by Carole Gardiner from Queens High in Dunedin this morning

http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2010/1/24/what-does-a-good-library-tell-you-about-a-school.html

"Had I any say in the decision, my grandsons would never attend a school that did not have a good* library program. You can tell a lot about a school's philosophy of education - in practice, not just in lip service - by what sort of library it supports."

He then goes on to list 12 beliefs demonstrated by a school with a good school library...

* Good = professional and support staff, adequate materials, articulated curriculum, pleasant physical plant, up-to-date technology.

It brings to mind an apposite quote from Harold Howe, II (1918-2002), former U.S. Commissioner of Education, in an interview "On Libraries and Learning":

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure
of what it feels about education."

School Library Journal, February 1967, v. 13, p. 28.

Karen Bonanno and school library management

Check out Karen Bonanno's website with various useful presentations, articles and resources she shares... http://www.schoollibrarymanagement.com/index.html

"schoollibrarymanagement.com is dedicated to the information specialists, teacher-librarians, school librarians, library media specialists, and those who work in school libraries worldwide, who are passionate about making a difference to student learning."

Karen held a webinar on school library advocacy in February this year, and her presentation is available here "7 Successful Strategies to Develop your Advocacy Toolkit"

Strategy 1: Identify a memorable message
Strategy 2: Capture killer statistics
Strategy 3: Gather startling facts
Strategy 4: Source quotable quotes
Strategy 5: Find remarkable stories
Strategy 6: Massage the media
Strategy 7: Leverage the network

Her presentation finishes with the tag : Collaboration, Community, Contribution - Build the Tribe.

I'm planning on joining her April webinar this evening - A point of view on Digital Literacy.

School Libraries Worldwide

School Libraries Worldwide is the official professional and research journal of the International Association of School Librarianship.

It is a refereed, peer-reviewed journal, published twice yearly, in January and July and is available online only on the IASL web portal http://iasl-online.org/pubs/slw/

School Libraries Worldwide publishes current research and scholarship on any aspect of school librarianship. Contributors are invited to submit new scholarly works, such as research reports and reviews of research.

School Libraries Count!

American Association of School Libraries’ (AASL) national longitudinal survey of School Library programmes.
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/researchandstatistics/slcsurvey/2010/slc2010.pdf
SOURCE: ResourceBlog, 29 October 2010

UK Literacy Trust survey on school library use / non use

From the UK National Literacy Trust, 5 October 2010, a new report :

Linking School Libraries and Literacy: Young people’s reading habits and attitudes to their school library, and an exploration of the relationship between school library use and school attainment

This paper explores what young people think about school libraries - do they use them? If yes, why? If not, why not? It also outlines how school library usage differs according to background demographics and reading attainment, and how it relates to wider enjoyment of reading, attitudes towards reading and reading frequency.

http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/assets/0000/5760/Linking_school_libraries_and_literacy_2010.pdf

In the findings, the majority of young people who use the school library use it because it has books that interest them, it is a friendly space and because they think it will help them do better at school. Most of the 28% of young people who do not use the school library cite the same reasons in reverse, ie because it does not have books that interest them, their friends do not go and because they do not think it will make them do better at school.

UK School Library Commission report

From the UK Literacy Trust website :

School libraries are too often a wasted resource.

Many school libraries are under-utilised resources that do not fulfil their potential to improve literacy levels and support pupil learning and attainment.

This is a key finding of the School Library Commission, chaired by Baroness Estelle Morris, and jointly established by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and independent charity the National Literacy Trust.

The Commission’s report, School Libraries: A plan for improvement finds that while school libraries have a unique role in raising pupils’ literacy levels, promoting reading for pleasure and improving their access to knowledge, in many schools the library is a wasted resource because it is poorly embedded in the infrastructure of the school and absent from school development plans. Read more

Click here for a copy of the full report :
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/assets/0000/5718/School_Libraries_A_Plan_for_Improvement.pdf

and here is an interview with the Commission's Chair.

In the conclusion the report says :

"In its call for evidence the Commission asked the question “is there any other service or partnership which can deliver the outcomes of a school library?”
In neither the evidence supplied nor the research examined could the Commissioners find any evidence that the school libraries role could be delivered in another way.

An effective school library acting as a powerhouse of learning and reading within a school is a unique resource. Our vision of a renewed school library system in the nation’s schools is fundamentally about realising the potential of every child by exciting the latent reader and learner in all."

Stephen Heppell on school libraries

http://www.cilip.org.uk/news-media/Pages/news072010.aspx

Survey of (UK) School Libraries shows gulf between best and the rest

There is a growing gap between the best services and those where resources and management support are failing, according to a new CILIP School Libraries Group report.

The national survey of UK school libraries has just been completed, with detailed replies from 1,547 secondary, middle, special and independent schools and exhaustive activity reports from over 1,000 of these, supplemented by information from 655 primary schools.

The final report School Libraries in the UK: a worthwhile past, a difficult present – and a transformed future? concludes that the vision and support of senior management is vital to success. It is crucial that school management recognise the difference that a good school library can make.

Currently, it is not a statutory requirement for schools in England to have a school library. Making school libraries and librarians statutory would be a big help in securing the vital role that libraries can play in enhancing teaching and learning.

Professor Stephen Heppell said: “The evidence continues to accumulate that libraries - and their librarians - lie absolutely at the heart of 3rd millennium learning organisations: a place for scholarship, a place to escape into adventures, a place of discovery, a place to share and explore, a place for deep thought, a place for surprise, and above all else a place absolutely without limits. The best schools have libraries at their centres not as some sad throwback to an earlier age but as a clear and evocative prototype of what ambitious learning might look like in this century of learning.”

Ross Todd's eloquence

Ross Todd is a brilliant, articulate advocate for school libraries.

Here is his inspiring definition of a school library :

"The school library is the school’s physical and virtual learning commons where inquiry, thinking, imagination, discovery, and creativity are central to students’ information-to-knowledge journey, and to their personal, social and cultural growth."

When searching for the exact wording of a half-remembered quote from Ross Todd, I revisited his 2001 IASL paper Transitions for preferred futures of school libraries with the subheadings :

• Knowledge space, not information place
• Connections, not collections
• Actions, not positions
• Evidence, not advocacy

See also this powerpoint School Libraries : making them a Class Act from a presentation Ross gave at the WA School Library Association Conference.

Award winning blogs to explore

Here is a link to Salem Press http://salempress.com/Store/blogs/blog_home.htm and their 2010 blog winners :

General Library Blogs
First place: Libraries and Transliteracy
Second place: Centered Librarian
Third place: Librarian.net

Quirky Library Blogs
First place: Awful Library Books
Second place: Library History Buff
Third place: Going Green At Your Library
Another Third place: Judge a Book by its Cover

Academic Library Blogs
First place: No Shelf Required
Second place: ResourceShelf
Third place: The Kept-Up Academic Librarian

Public Library Blogs
First place: Agnostic, Maybe
Second place: Blogging for a Good Book
Third place: Library Garden

School Library Blogs
First Place: Bib 2.0 "exploring the integration of technology into the library and classroom"
Second Place: Not So Distant Future
Third Place: 100 Scope Notes - has an amazing list of children's lit blogs in the right sidebar


Not so distant future blog has a post with Twitter advice to new library school students :

Getting Started
On Monday, a group of library school students is coming to visit my library, so today I asked my colleagues on Twitter to share their advice to new or incoming librarians...

If I had to express my advice in 140 characters, I think it would be:
embrace the new, support and collaborate with teachers, put students first, always learn, share your passion, always reflect, lead change

And this is totally unrelated to libraries but a heartwarming animal story shared as an "end of year" post on Bib 2.0 blog...
http://bib20.blogspot.com/2010/06/i-love-this.html

School Libraries : a position paper from CISSL

School libraries, now more than ever: A position paper of The Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries

The Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL) at Rutgers University holds the belief, substantiated by five decades of research, that school libraries help young people learn.

School libraries are learning laboratories where information, technology, and inquiry come together in a dynamic that resonates with 21st century learners.

School libraries are the school’s physical and virtual learning commons where inquiry, thinking, imagination, discovery, and creativity are central to students’ information-to-knowledge journey, and to their personal, social and cultural growth.

School librarians understand that children of the Millennium generation are consumers and creators in multi-media digital spaces where they download music, games, and movies, create websites, avatars, surveys and videos, and engage in social networking (National School Boards Association, 2007). They know that the world of this young generation is situated at the crossroads of information and communication.

School librarians bring pedagogical order and harmony to a multi-media clutter of information by crafting challenging learning opportunities, in collaboration with classroom teachers and other learning specialists, to help learners use the virtual world, as well as traditional information sources, to prepare for living, working, and life-long learning in the 21st century.

Schools without libraries minimize the opportunities for students to become discriminating users in a diverse information landscape and to develop the intellectual scaffolds for learning deeply through information.

Schools without libraries are at risk of becoming irrelevant.”

http://cissl.scils.rutgers.edu/CISSL_POSITION_PAPER_revised.doc
SOURCE: Stephen's Lighthouse, 13 May 2010