Giving the People What They Want: Patron-Led Acquisition

I’m a massive advocate for buying books my students recommend and have spent a lot of time and effort building a culture in my school library where students are easily able to request books. After all, why would I spend money guessing what they might like and risk getting it wrong when I can just get tips on the most wanted books straight from the source?

Last year, 56% of the books I bought were based on student recommendations. We also had our best ever year for loans, despite the library being closed for a significant amount of time. Clearly buying books students are interested in has had a positive impact on their engagement with our collection.

This year, due to my budget being cut in half, I’ve had to rely heavily on recommendations to ensure maximum bang for our buck. Some of these recommendations present no surprises, such as continuing popular Manga series, but others have seemingly come out of left field. We’ve had a number of requests for different non-fiction topics, including the history of computers, philosophy, astronomy, neurosurgery and the Yugoslav Wars, suggesting that there’s more of a market for our non-fiction collection than our loans data would indicate. It’s definitely worth promoting this collection to our students!

Social media is a powerful tool to promote our libraries and their resources. I’ve therefore created a short video to promote these new releases on our school’s socials and to highlight the role student voice played in their selection. Check out the video below!

Promoting the Library in Term 2

Sadly, due to my injury and extended recovery I’ve been off for the vast majority of Term 2. The good news is that we live in a connected world, so I’m still able to promote our library and ensure access to its resources through our virtual library and social media platforms!

We’ve recently moved to a different online format for our school’s newsletter. Having the ability to take advantage of the different website features is a game-changer for promoting the library and allows me to be more visual with my content. This term I took the advice of a webinar I attended earlier this year and showcased the reading achievements of our students, giving shout-outs to the hard-working kids who have already completed the Premier’s Reading Challenge and to our top borrowers. I also chose to highlight the books which are currently trending in our library:

The wonderful thing about these presentations is that they are reusable: they can be embedded into the new website format for parents, and I can display them on the library TV during breaks, reading lessons, and meetings to promote the resources to our students and staff throughout next term. Two birds, one presentation!

Since the library has been closed for an extended period, it’s been crucially important to maintain access to our virtual resources where possible. I therefore also created a visual resource to promote our ebooks and audiobooks to our community over the school holidays via our Instagram and Facebook pages:

Hopefully visually showcasing these titles will spark conversations amongst our students, staff, and parents, help normalise reading as a leisure activity, and remind my community that reading can be a social activity.

It’s been a long, disrupted term but it’s finally at an end. To my fellow NSW teachers, happy holidays! Rest up, recharge, and relax!

Promoting the Library in Term 1

One of the big lessons I took from my TL degree was around the importance of promoting our work as a way of advocating for our value to our communities. There’s no point having an efficiently managed collection or killer programs if no one knows they’re available. Even worse, a lack of visibility means that our hard work goes unnoticed, and our often isolated positions within schools makes us especially vulnerable if we’re not getting out there and spreading the good word. NSW Department of Education schools have recently been hit with new budget cuts, making it even more important that I ensure that my work is understood and valued by those around me, especially by those who hold the power and purse-strings in the school.

In addition to my displays, social media posts, and Annual Reports (which ended up receiving positive feedback from my Principal), in Term 1 I advocated for the library to our wider community in a number of other ways. Last term we moved to a new website platform for our school newsletter, which allowed me to be a bit more creative than our old pdf offerings. I now have an entire page dedicated to library events and news, and used it as an opportunity to promote the Premier’s Reading Challenge as well as our virtual library. Due to the interactive nature of the new platform, I was also able to include a digital presentation, which I’m also aiming to project onto our library display TV using our Apple TV device during the day for visitors to the library space to see.

We do have a school website but it’s controlled by one person, so every time I need to send an update I need to send the info to her then wait for it to be changed which isn’t all that efficient. One of my Head Teachers raised the idea of having a library website that I control linked to our official school site, featuring study guides, video tutorials, and literacy activities. During the ETL512 subject we had a virtual visit with the teacher-librarians from Lake Tuggeranong College who had a similar library website that I found very inspirational. I think this will be a fantastic opportunity to further share my work and showcase my value, and will definitely be a goal of mine in future.

Top Reads 2021

As 2021 draws to a close, I thought it would be a nice idea to reflect on  the 26 books that I managed to read this year. Here are my favourites!

I know it might not sound like much, but I’m proud of myself for carving out the time to read 26 books; I don’t think I’ve read that many since my carefree, idle days as a school student. Next year I’ll be aiming for 27 and will be tracking them on the newly-found The Storygraph. Wish me luck!

Cheers to the books I’ve read in 2021, and cheers again to the new ones I’ll discover in 2022! 🥳🍾🎉