Featured Articles
School Library Media Activities Monthly/Volume XVIII, Number 1/September 2000/page 31-32
Chart Your Course
by Catherine Beyers
Catherine Beyers is a library media specialist at Southern Bluffs Elementary in LaCrosse, WI. Email: cbeyers@charter.net
How many of you have ever packed a suitcase, loaded your car, and pulled out of the driveway without a specific destination in mind during summer? Not many, I'll guess. To make the best use of every vacation day available, I always want to do advance planning. Making reservations, buying tickets, and organizing the rest of the family are all important activities before leaving home. I want this to be a memorable vacation!
Library media programs deserve advance planning as well. We all want an outstanding library media center and program. How will we know if we have made progress if we don't know where we are going?
Think about what kinds of improvements you want to make in your program. Does your clientele need more materials, better service, something to raise the level of excitement, or all of the above?
In past years, each fall at my school, Southern Bluffs Elementary, the teacher assistant and I have developed measurable goals for our school library media program. I wrote them down; my principal, teacher assistant, and I signed them; and, periodically, my teacher assistant and I reviewed our progress, helping us stay on track for the year. It also was encouraging to see that our efforts were successful. Then in June, my principal and I would review the goals at our end-of-year meeting.
Rather than planning one year at a time each fall, we began a three-year planning process in 2003. An AASL workshop that focused on advocacy helped me take a longer view of planning and helped to alter the focus of our goal setting. Rather than concentrate on what I thought we needed to do, I instead tried to focus on what our patrons wanted out of the library media program. I found a needs survey on the Web, adapted it to our school, and asked my staff to respond. The survey ended up being a positive experience, although I was initially worried about sending it out. The results affirmed what we were doing in many areas and gave us some needed direction in others. For example, teachers wanted more opportunities for students to be in the library media center at times when we could assist them. Utilizing the ALA/AASL national library promotion, the theme of the first year was "Picture yourself @ your library®."
In conjunction with our theme, related to teachers' expressed needs, the first and last thirty minutes of every day has become Open Checkout Time. Teachers are encouraged to send their students to the library media center during these time periods whenever students are in need of a new book or searching assistance. Because the teacher assistant is not in the library media center all day, we chose times when both of us would be available and when I didn't have scheduled classes. This has worked well.
To further promote our theme, I located mouse pads that accommodated an inserted photograph and added the message "Picture yourself @ your library®" using a silver paint pen. Pictures of students and staff reading or working in the library media center are used in the mouse pads at each catalog lookup station in the library media center. I try to change these once a month to keep the interest high. A digital camera makes this possible.
Posters of our excited readers recommending favorite books also are displayed throughout the year. The posters are printed in black and white on colored legal-size paper to keep costs down. I always print two so that we can give one to the student. I've seen some really jazzy student posters printed in color, laminated, and framed; but, for me, if a project gets too complicated, I tend not to follow up very well (the simpler, the better).
Read Across Southern Bluffs Elementary is another promotion and is used for Read Across America Day. Our partner classrooms (one primary and one intermediate class, paired for a variety of activities during the year) gather in the main hall with books to share with one another for half an hour. We take lots of photos, wear red-and-white Seuss hats, hand out stickers to intent readers, and distribute bookmarks to all. This yearly tradition lives on for more than a month through the photographs we post on the library media center bulspeed. The faculty like this project because it requires almost no advance planning, a minimum amount of time, little disruption of the schedule, and the total focus is on reading together.
In the first year when we prepared program goals, we also began keeping a notebook of the library media center program activities. I included samples of bookmarks created, photos of displays, information related to visiting authors, newsletters, and anything and everything that related to our media program. These notebooks have been invaluable! I rarely have to build any project from scratch. The binder also has been an asset when meeting with my principal or the director of libraries. I have documentation of projects developed and penciled notes referencing any changes needed the next time we undertake a similar activity.
These were just a few of the ideas from our first year campaign. You can locate many more with the help of the Campaign for America's Libraries' Toolkit for School Library Media Programs. It's available for $5.00 for both members and nonmembers or as a pdf or Word file. The booklet has several ideas for print advertising, campaign themes, a calendar of promotional opportunities, a sampling of how different schools are creating advocacy activities that work, and lots more. You also will find digital clip art, sample letters, and a host of other plans on the website. Clever ideas are continually added to the site. Check it out for help and encouragement!