Module 5.2 5 reasons why school libraries should be using social media

Posted on January 12, 2016 by abond

The three library websites I compared were Christchurch City Libraries, Auckland libraries and United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA) an international school in Singapore. I was hoping to compare three school libraries but as I was researching for this post I found many school library websites are behind password protection or are simply a page on the school website with a link to the catalogue.

Andy Burkhardt states that libraries should be using social media to: communicate, respond to feedback, promotions and getting to know their users (2009). Here are some reasons school libraries should be using social media

Build community. One of the great advantages of social media is that it encourages communication, collaboration and the building of community. Both the Christchurch City library website and the Auckland Libraries website have tabs for teens and kids. On the Teens pages there are sections for homework help. Both libraries also have photo sharing tools Flickr for Christchurch and Instagram for Auckland. Both show community events within the library and in other areas. Both libraries have Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Get the message out. All websites have articles, links to events happening within their libraries. Summer reading programmes, seminars, resources. The two public libraries also have ways to tweet or like their posts. This feature helps the message spread even further than the reach of the library website, utilising the friends and followers of their patrons. These extra tools encourage further communication and collaboration (Braxton, 2015).
Access resources. UWCSEA has booking sheets for spaces within the library. They show that teachers and students and parents can book these areas. All the libraries have ways to access the catalogue and e-resources. UWCSEA also has libguides for students and teachers including seminars for deeper learning. Christchurch and Auckland have a way to book a one to one session with a librarian to help with research, computer skills or reading recommendations.
Opportunities for participation. One thing social media and web2.0 offers library patrons is the chance to participate. The public libraries have areas on their websites that enable patrons to recommend books for purchase or give feedback about programmes and services. There are blogs offered that have comments enabled. By adding in the opportunity to get involved the visitors to the website also take ownership of the library itself (LeGarde, 2011).
Getting parents involved and caring about their school library. Barbara Braxton recommended that librarians should target parents, peers and principals when advocating for their libraries (2012). Particularly when it comes to parents, as they can be powerful school library advocates, she recommends being a prominent presence through newsletters, website and social networking (Braxton, 2012). UWCSEA has a sign up area for parent volunteers in the library as a tab on their website.

These are great reasons for school libraries to get involved with social media.

References

Braxton, B. (2012, July 12). Peeing on the job [Blog post]. Retrieved from Blue Skunk Blog: http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2012/7/12/peeing-on-the-job-guest-post-by-barbara-braxton.html

Braxton, B. (2015, July 19). The social media hat [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://500hats.edublogs.org/2015/07/19/the-social-media-hat/

Burkhardt, A. (2009, August 25). Four reasons libraries should be on social media. Retrieved January 11, 2016, from http://andyburkhardt.com/2009/08/25/four-reasons-libraries-should-be-on-social-media/

LeGarde, J. (2011, August 9). 5 things every school library website should have [Blog post]. Retrieved from The adventures of library girl website: http://www.librarygirl.net/2011/08/5-things-every-school-library-website.html

Final reflection ETL 505

Posted on October 11, 2015 by abond

Access – it’s all about access. The purpose of resource description is to provide users with access to the information that a resource contains (Hider, 2013, p.3). This is the reason we classify resources in our school libraries now and will continue to do so in the future.

These days our students can access a flood of information on almost any subject through a keyword search on Google. This fast and easy keyword searching is often used in the library catalogue as well but it provides a lot of irrelevant information (Scribner Library, 2015). Classification and resource description provide subject headings. Using a subject search within a catalogue or a database, the student will find fewer resources but those resources will be relevant to the topic of their research (Scribner Library, 2015). The subject search approach is something our students need to learn and utilise in order to discover useful and relevant information.

Some school libraries have decided to adopt genre and subject headings as a way to organise their resources rather than using Dewey. An example of this can be found in St. Vrain Valley School District, Colorado (Buchter, 2013, p.49). While the library does not use Dewey the librarians have devised a subject heading list that they use to classify their resources so their students can find them. The subject classification utilises assigned, controlled headings (Buchter, 2013, p.51). As other schools discuss this method of resource organisation for their libraries it is important that Teacher Librarians (TLs) understand the implications of such a change in terms of access to resources and information for the students.

It is essential to be accurate in describing resources. Unfortunately in this digital age where catalogue records are easy to download, the skills of cataloguing are often undervalued. Yet a mistake in a record can mean the record and, therefore, the resource becomes irretrievable (Attar, 2006, p.174). It is clear that, at the very least, a basic understanding of cataloguing is needed by all librarians including TLs. Cataloguing is anything but intuitive, and no matter how intelligent the person cataloguing is, unless they have an understanding of subject headings, classification, the need for correct spelling, word order and punctuation, they will unwittingly deny access to that resource (Attar, 2006, p. 184). While it is easy to import existing records into school library catalogues, it is still the responsibility of TLs to know their students and to apply location classifications and additional subject headings or notes which will provide access to resources.

Digitisation allows library catalogues to develop and offer federated searches. The students can search physical library resources and the databases on offer in one search. To achieve this level of interoperability the systems will need to “talk to each other” which in turn requires a level of standardisation between them (Hider, 2013, p, 47). The ease of internet searching means that students now expect a “one-stop” approach in their library catalogue. If cataloguers can continue to devise ways to meet user expectations of seamless searches then the future for cataloguing appears to be bright indeed (Hider, 2006, p.164). A large part of the contribution cataloguers can bring to the evolving information age is the methodology of describing resources in such a manner that enables quality information to be accessed.

References

Attar, K. E. (2006). Why appoint professionals? A student cataloguing project. Journal of librarianship and information science, 38(3), 173-185. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0961000606066578

Buchter, H. (2013). Dewey vs genre throwdown. Knowledge Quest, 42(2), 48-55. Retrieved from EBSCOhost database. (Accession No. 91761325)

Hider, P. (2007). Information access. In S. Ferguson (Author), Libraries in the twenty-first century: Charting new directions in information services (pp. 145-164) [PDF]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-876938-43-7.50019-3

Hider, P. (2013). Information resource description: Creating and managing metadata (U.S. ed.). Chicago, Ill.: ALA editions.

Scribner Library. (2015, August 24). Keywords and subject terms [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTQbacIha2Q

The need for information resource description

Posted on July 25, 2015 by abond

When I was a beginning teacher – teaching High School ‘English language and literature’ our English department had this terrible habit of using the attribute of the colour of the cover of a book to talk about texts instead of title or author. The conversation went like this…”Oh there is a great chapter of speaking skills and writing speeches in the book with the reddish orange cover.” That would have helped if our bookroom was organised in terms of colour of the book cover but no – we organised in terms of book title. When I left the school I took the time to write all the titles of the books on colour sheets corresponding with the colour of the cover of the books – my little gift to help out.

Why I am mentioning this is that I live in a country where it is hard to get books delivered from Amazon or other sources. There are huge delays in delivery. If the value of the book is more than 80 Euros it is held up in customs until you pay a tax on it. Needless to say I was nervous about purchasing our textbook. I will outline how I managed to do this below but I do have the book. I had a serious crisis of confidence that I had the correct book when Kasey mentioned that the textbook had a purple and red cover. The one I have has a lovely blue cover… yikes. I quickly double checked and YES it is the right book. My book is a “simultaneous U.S. edition published by ALA editions..” So the colour of the cover of the book is not necessarily a good attribute to use when describing it to students who may be purchasing it from other sources globally.

The elements/attributes I used when purchasing our textbook were title, author, publication year, publisher and city of publication. I decided to use Amazon as a source for the book as my husband and son were about to go to London to visit friends. So when using these elements in the four basic tasks described by FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) it looked like this…

FIND – I used the title of the book to find it on Amazon. The title and subtitle were very helpful in the search.

IDENTIFY – Once I had a search result I used the author name, publication year, publisher and city of publication to check I had the correct book. There was no ISBN given in the subject outline which is where I found the onformation. I am not sure it would have helped actually.

SELECT – Here I checked the price of the book on Amazon US and compared it to the price of the book on Amazon

UK. The UK book was much more expensive and sent to the UK from the USA. I also checked withour friends to see if there was any difficulty ordering from Amazon USA and getting it delivered to the UK. No problem at all. So I selected the book from Amazon USA and gave our friend’s home as the delivery address.

OBTAIN – The book was delivered to our friend’s house and my husband and son collected while they were visiting and brought it back to Turkey for me.

Why should Teacher Librarians have an understanding of resource description?

Even if we are importing record information into our local school catalogues understanding resource description is important because

* our students and colleagues have local needs, specific curriculum standards and units that may be best served by adding to catalogue records we import.

* some of our records may have been created before other were imported so we need to check to see if they are of the same quality.

* understanding our own needs and then viewing the records as they are imported may help us give feedback to the catalogue record creators so they can improve their records for everyone’s sake.

* some resources we acquire may not have records to import.

* we will want to add locally produced resources to our catalogue. We have quite a few books created by students which other students use and enjoy.

*it could help us determine how to teach our student and colleagues how to use the catalogue so that as they move to other schools or use other libraries they will have expertise to access their collections too.

Starting with the end in mind

Posted on July 20, 2015 by abond

I see that at the end of this paper we are to complete a reflection on our Blog. One way I like to reflect is to see where I started from and then consider all the things I have learned while studying this paper.

To be honest I am taking this paper as it is a compulsory part of the Master’s degree. I am not sure I would choose to study cataloging. The paper title is “Describing and analyzing education resources” which sounds excellent though most librarians would read this as cataloging.

I think it is essential to make sure the people using our collection know how to access all the materials we have. I love our catalogue system “Destiny” provided by Follett. I want everyone to see all the great resources we have and if they know of other resources we need to suggest them to me.

One real problem I have is that I have inherited a catalogue that has been created by people who were not trained librarians and which is added to by someone who is not a trained librarian. Our catalogue records are shambolic to say the least.

I really want to learn in this paper is how to catalogue in such a way that my students and colleagues can find what they are looking for. I also want to learn how to edit existing catalogue records and improve them. I would love to develop a systematic way to check records and then edit them.

I would also love to learn how to teach my students and colleagues how to use the catalogue. Perhaps I should do some research to see what they do and then work out how to best help them. I have committed to creating some screen capture videos to show people how to use Destiny. This would be a great way to show them how to access our resources. I hope this course will help me to do that really effectively by knowing what sort of information to include.

So these are my beginning thoughts. A place to start. Here is a video I made about how we use Destiny at IICS.