Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Yesterday I was so upset because my removing 1165 books from the catalog hardly made a dent in bringing up my average age of the collection. So I set my helpers to finding 1000+ books from the Fiction section to be discarded. We began that process today. While they worked, I began to study the reports of discarded materials. The lists I had given my helpers were just spreadsheets with old books sorted by call number. (I made them because TW only gives the aged titles in “age” order. That way they could start at a right shelf and remove titles and check them off as they worked their way across the library. Trust me, locating books by Dewey order is much easier. I began looking at the sheets they had used, and realized SO MANY were not found. I just reasoned that they were lost. The first page of these titles were showing up in a search of the catalog, and they were not classified as lost or missing. In the inventory, books not scanned (due to not being on the shelf) would have been changed automatically to lost or missing. Being new to Destiny, I didn’t know which. So I decided to check the last inventory report. I went into the books and reports section (i don’t recall right off the top what it is called) and discovered that NO reports existed for deleted books. The only deleted books reports that existed were the 1165 I had done during the week. I was having a bad feeling about this. I decided to run the report (over 100+ pages) of the inventory, which would show books accounted for, and books unaccounted for. Okay, hold onto your shorts…there were over 50 pages of books unaccounted for! Now each page listed at least 25 titles, and I did not physically count to see. I was absolutely feeling nauseated! I asked my library assistant, who assured me MANY books were weeded last year too. But there was no record of deleted books (except the ones I had done this week.) So the realization we both had at the same time was that all the books (and neither of us knew how many) had been weeded and discarded last year, but none had been taken out of the system. So the 11,000 materials this library has is actually PROBABLY half that, especially after we finish weeding the books that are currently being de-labeled and identifying stamps marked out. I am probably getting ready to go from offering ten books a student to MAYBE five. My collection according to the SDE rubric will be labeled “Below Standard.” I might get lucky and earn an “Emerging” label. Yes, it makes me feel sick. My assistant wanted to return the fiction books we pulled, but I told her NO! I said if we ran a circulation record for those titles, we’d find that 90% of them did not circulate, and they were OLD, GROSS, and downright SMELLY! I told her I’d beg for funding from the school and district if I had to, and work on writing grants too. But we were not putting those books back on the shelf. So there. My media coordinator is in talks with Destiny Tech Support about possibly doing a global delete of all the unaccounted books. We rationalized that if any showed up that were truly worth keeping, we would re-catalog those books, which is probably the simplest solution. So now I look forward to completing round 2 of the weed, and round 3 of the global delete weed. I anxiously await our damage to both our age and quantity. I hypothesize the age will get dramatically better, and the quantity books per students will go down drastically–to a point that will REALLY look bad. Bummer.

How many books are we losing? Let’s estimate to the best of my mathematical ability:
This week we weeded 1165 books, making the grand total of materials = to 10094

We are weeding about 1000 more (fiction books), so the materials should soon equal 9094.

If there were 25 books a page on the fifty pages of “unaccounted for” books, then we are missing another 1250 that will be deleted as well, leaving an estimated 7844.

7844 divided by our enrollment of 650 = 12 books per student??? Okay, so I’ll be okay in the number of books per student. But this is STILL a very discomforting feeling. And their are other sections that need a weed, like Reference and Biography. : (

Anyone want to join in my pity party? Actually it is comforting to reflect and realize that no matter what, I’m already making a huge impact at my new school in that very dated library.

I just blogged about this over on SCASL Blogs! but wanted to share the love here to! Here is the post from over there, just in case you don’t subscribe to that one!

Today is Blog Day 2007, and there is a “meme” of sorts going around. So I must first post the instructions, and then point readers to new blogs. Recently I wrote an article for our SCASL Media Center Messenger about the power of Web 2.0, and asked any LMS’s out there in SC to send me URLs of their blogs. So I will point you to theirs.
BlogDay posting instructions:

1. 1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. 2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2007
3. 3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blog
4. 4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
5. 5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

Fellow SC library media specialist Brenda Branson at Crowders Creek Middle school is introducing her students using CCMS Blog

Whack Books, is a blog from LMS April Llibre of Walhalla High School. The opening line at the top of the page says it all, which I will quote here: Welcome to the Walhalla High School Library book blog, Whack Books…as in, “That book is SO whack (good),” OR, “That book is SO whack (bad)!” Join us for discussions about books; tell us what you really think.

Beck Academy (Greenville County) LMS Andi Fansher’s Library News You Can Use is available as a professional-type blog with a target audience of teachers. She also has a student portal, the Beck Academy Library Media Center.

LMS Stacy Symborski of D.R. Hill Middle School in Duncan, SC is blogging at Reading Rocks at D.R. Hill Middle.

LMS Sue Fitzgerald blogs for a target audience of students at her Dorman High School Blog to discuss school related topics.

So now you have some other adopters of the web 2.0 way, and you can use them as models too. Don’t forget to drop by my blogs as well, TechnoTuesday and @ the CMS Library. I still consider my self a newbie, and my student blog is still in its infancy, not even yet having been introduced to our faculty or students! Be sure to visit and leave a comment. Some say web 2.0 means read/write, so read their blogs and write a COMMENT!! Show them some blog love!

Technorati Tag: Blog Day 2007

I am just a little disappointed. You see for the last eight school days (give or take) there has been a major focus on weeding, particularly the nonfiction section of our collection. We came back this summer to all the books from mid 550 through 818 boxed up due to the addition of our production studio, and these books needed to be reshelved. I made the decision to unmercifully weed since they each had an opportunity to be handled, smelled, and seen with a critical eye (and nose–yes some smelled OLD!) I was given the go ahead by my principal and district media coordinator, and tackled the project with zest. Me, my assistant, substitutes and a parent volunteer began. We only devoted half of the day to the task as other activities and needs arose daily–we’re there to serve our staff and students first and foremost, so they always come before most library management type activity. Since we were reshelving we decided to do all of the nonfiction (000=999). Now I printed and gave the folks helping a printout of the books I suspected needed to go (of course I physically checked every book before it was discarded) and today figured that we discarded a total of 1165 books. There were MANY on the list that were just NOT found. I will have to check in Destiny to see if these books are categorized as “lost” from inventories that have been done prior to my coming in. We may be able to delete a few more. I sort of hope so.

South Carolina, so NOTORIOUS for poor test scores, has a reputation regarding our educational standards for teaching. When NCLB came about, SC had already set the bar high as far as student achievement. So our standards are rigorous, as is our state assessment program. I blogged about this before, and you can read the archived post from June 2007  for a more clear description.

Recently, our SC State Department of Education contact and liaison for library media programs released an assessment instrument to use on school library media programs. It is titled Achieving Exemplary School Libraries: School Library Program Recommendations and Evaluation Rubrics and it is located on the section for school library media programs, though I believe one has to be logged in to view it. It is 55 pages in length and is what I beleive a fair document. It is my goal to bring my collection up to what this document calls proficient, though I will long range goal work for what is known as exemplary. The “grades” a program can make even loosely match how are students are labeled based on their performance on our state assessment program of PACT (and scores classify one as Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced). PACT, I should say, our assessment program, stands for Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test. Even the name suggests to the unschooled reader that the test is designed to “challenge” students. Go figure! Using this rubric, a school library media program might be labeled Below Standard, Emerging, Proficient, or Exemplary. It’s pretty rigorous too, but not unattainable.

Which brings me back to this post. A lot of time, hard work, sweat, and sore muscles went into the discarding of those 1165 books. I was SO hoping that I would lose five years off my average collection age of 1988. But this evening I ran another collection analysis (our district uses Follett’s Titlewise.) I have actually used the program in all my years as a school LMS–since it was started. I find it an invaluable tool for assessing your collection. So I uploaded my records tonight, and my collection only lost 2 years. Now instead of 1988 as an average copyright date, the collection is 1990. Here is the data from TW.

But there is more. In order to be “Exemplary” there are roughly fifteen or so indicators that refer to the collection. These indicators have to do with age sensitivity for the various areas (i.e. sciences are more age sensitive than folk tales or fiction…) Here is a view of the beginning of the “indicators.”

Did you notice the number of books per student?? 15 per student. With my school having according to the analysis 566 students (and I know that does not match enrollment right now since we are roughly 650 students as of Wednesday…) we are right now offering 17.63 books per student. I should have adjusted the enrollment number BEFORE running the analysis. But a quickie punch on the calculator shows that we currently offer an estimated 650 students 15.53 books per student. Proficient only calls for ten books per student….With a goal to be exemplary, I cannot afford to weed anymore, but my age absolutely DEMANDS it. Am I holding myself to too high a standard?? I will be acquiring more books to the collection, and usually its about 300 books a year. (Note I still do not know what my budget is yet, so I could be way off in either direction, to the good or bad. If I am off I do pray its in my favor.)

Again it is just a snapshot above, and then that section is JUST about books. The program is also evaluated on scheduling, collaboration, instructional practices, and other areas.

So where do I go from here? To be proficient, I can drop down to ten books per students, and that also keeps me within SACS requiremnts. So I am going to shift my weeding helpers to the fiction section and the story collection section. These two sections are very old too, and even though the SC section is small, the fiction represents 35% of our total collection. Maybe getting in there and ridding the shelves of old stories will help. So I’m going to allow for about another 1000 books to go.

Overall I’m not too sad. The change in copyright age from 88 to 90 does indicate the collection is being addressed. And we’ve only just begun, not to mention this should not happen over night. Maybe not even in one school year. Wish me luck.

Okay so I get up a little earlier each morning for this vice of mine called blog reading, and imagine my shock, surprise, and delight to find that Doug Johnson, author of the Blue Skunk Blog, had read my post (titled Come Ride the Wave of Web 2.0 and Information Literacy) over on SCASL Blogs! and left me a very complimentary comment. Here it is:

To say that I was ecstatic is an understatement. You see this post appeared in our state organization (South Carolina Association of school Librarians) quarterly publication The Media Center Messenger, and I received a couple of emails from people about how much they liked the article. Since I knew it had been published (my deadline/due date to submit was a good while back in the summer) I had created the SCASL Blogs post to come out at the same time, so that if readers wanted to, they could visit the blog and use the hyperlinks to look at the suggested links. So I published the post yesterday!

What would bring me down?? A good friend today pointed out that some of the links go to blogs that are no longer maintained, and that I might want to find replacement links. BUMMER! One is for my own former school library blog–but I have not deleted that blog. (My rationale is that it is still an example worth mentioning though.) Another goes to a media specialist’s blog, and she has since changed jobs, and apparently professions. She is not working at the school referenced anymore, and is not serving as a school media specialist, but rather as a technology specialist in another area. So I am embarrassed and deflated to realize my links are not so great afterall. I am soliciting our fellow LMS’s on our state’s list so I can put up another post highlighting more that are current and up to date, but this is just bugging me.

I guess I should just get over myself, since I know only too well what is on the WWW today is not guaranteed to be there the next day, or be the same…but I feel like I owe someone an apology. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

I discovered today that I am in need of statistics.  This is an SYP post by the way, so I may stray from topic to topic, and ramble, as I do more frequently than not.  I’ve distributed around a dozen printer cartridges since teachers returned.  I sadly discovered that the library is responsible for providing teachers with replacement cartridges. This saddens me b/c I’ve been doing this teaching gig long enough to know that some teachers print everything even if it’s not important, and some print a lot of material unrelated to school in general.  I asked my assistant if any records had been kept on the numbers of cartridges used, and she handed m a legal pad where last year she and the retired LMS wrote down every time someone came and asked for one.  After analyzing that data,  I found roughly seven who were asking for cartridges continuosly, going through at least one in a month’s time all year.  Forgive me if I don’t know how long it takes to go through a cartridge anymore–This is shocking b/c the school from where I came pretty muched used laser printers, both b/w and color, and I never printed to a desktop printer for the last three years at least. In SC, our teachers are given (YES I said given) $275 to purchase classroom supplies. In my old district teacher materials & supplies other than paper were the teacher’s responsibility (including getting those really expensive cartridges.) That is what many teachers used their money on, among other things. This school had even gone to requiring teachers to purchase VCRs and DVD players for their rooms if they so chose–basically because the school had a video distribution system in the media center, and any instructional video could be played from there. Teachers bought a wide array of stuff, including furniture, books, printers, and even webspace for the adventurous ones.

We have roughly 32 teachers across three grade levels, and that is not counting those singletons like me (who work with students but not in the same sense as a classroom teacher.) When you think that the average printer cartridge runs no less than $20, and most everybody’s printer needs a black and a color cartridge—well it gets pretty expensive just to replace the pair one time. Most teachers had their cartridges changed twice (with the exception of the print happy teachers who had b/w them roughly 9 cartidges each.)

Let’s look closer at some numbers.

7 teachers used 9 cartridges (1 a month last year.)  9×7 = 63 x estimated $20 a cartridge = $1260

The remaining group on average had 2 cartridges changed during the year–
32 teachers - the 7 already mentioned = 25 teachers.
25 x 2 cartridges each = 50 x estimated $20 a cartridge = $1000

Total estimated cost to supply classroom teachers w/ replacement printer cartridges = $2260.

Also add in that the library is responsible for the toner for all laser b/w printers (4 of them) and 2 color laser printers, and we are talking a huge chunk of change!

As you can see. I’m collecting dat for a principal presentation. I just need to find a way to present this so it does not come across as a whine.  I also had a teacher come to me about the new Dell projectors that eight teachers received.  SHe is telling me her (and her co-teacher next door) need USB/printer cables for their projectors.  At first I thought she was confused, but she took mine from my desktop printer, showed me the two ends (one USB and one more square shaped like this, she shared and pointed to).  Okay, I’m notorious for taking things out of the box and putting them together w/o referring to directions frequently, especially when I have working knowledge of them from previous experience. I just put one of the projectors out of its box and connected it to a laptop today, and I don’t recall thinking I needed a USB printer cable!!  Now I need to go back to school and find that dang guide (of which I have no idea its location) and look it up! GRRR. I just cannot fathom that a projector of any kind needs a printer cable.

Oh it’s so fun being new.  I’m trying to decide if 1) she doesn’t realize what she is asking for; 2) she knows exactly what she is asking for; or 3) my chain is being jerked.  Either way, the library is responsible for acquiring these needs.  On the light side, there is a tech budget, though I have yet to see anything in writing regarding my budgets.

Positive NOTES:

I finally got one of the other new teachers into her email account.  She kept confusing her netowrk login w/ her Groupwise (email)login. She listened as I troubleshooted another teachers’ password for Novell, and something I said jogged her memory about what her password is.  She had 77 unread emails. She was quite happy but overwhelmed.

The PE coaches were having troouble printing. I went and looked (I’m a visual learner) and low and behold their laser printers (yes–they have laser networked printers EACH–and they are in offices side by side) were loaded and there, but they were printing to a document writer, which each time asked them to save instead of print. So I reconfigured, and magically they printed.  They were ecstatic.  I thought it was a simple task, but I guess this is all about perspective.

We finished weeding the Nonfiction and Biographies, but I could not run any reports b/c Destiny is in the process of having the student db rolled in. It tells me its running SIF (what ever that means) and i can’t get into it. Maybe tomorrow or whenever I update an SYP again, I’ll be able to report that our age went down. My goal with this first sweep is five years, though I may be dreaming.  But I kid you not when I say we got rid of some real OLDIES!

Wow, I’m posting something again in one day.  Shame on me.  But son #1 is in Chicago for college–his sophomore classes start next week.  And high school junior son #2  is out with his teenaged friends for a little while. And hubby is fast asleep on the couch.  So I was cruising through my Bloglines–I hadn’t  been able to read any since Thursday evening until this morning.  That is not unusual, b/c family generally comes first, and it was a family thing yesterday evening –all evening.  But I picked back up my reading this morning, and I came across this post, and decided to email it to my principal.  I liked my email note so much I thought I would post it here too. (It’s a sickness, I guess, and I just can’t help it.)  The email subject was the same as the heading here–”Are you reading anything today?”,  and here is what I wrote to her:

Okay I admit I can be annoying at times.  I read a lot (what librarian doesn’t?) and am fascinated with professional development.  I am totally addicted to blogging (but primarily in the professional sense) so I can’t help but try to spread my joy.  So I am sending you a link to a blog I read from that I think you may enjoy.  It is called LeaderTalk, and it is written I gather by “invited” administrators who blog about administrative stuff. Yes a lot of it is about technology, but a lot of the material recently is about starting back to school. I thought  you might enjoy it.

I will post it below.  I also want to explain how I follow this stuff, because quite honestly folks DO NOT have time to sit around and cruise the Internet, especially when family time is precious.  I do not cruise the Internet looking for this material, but rather set it up so it comes to me.  I use an aggregator (which translates loosely to a reader).  I can visit one site, and anything I subscribe to comes to that reader. And that is how this one came to my attention. (Of course there is not new material everyday, which makes this very manageable, too.) Reading my “feeds” is like reading a newspaper or a journal (magazine) each evening when I sit down after dinner.  Actually reading feeds, listening to podcasts, and listening/participating in webcasts has all but replaced my desire to watch television in general.

But I go overboard here.  My intent here was to maybe get you to read a post from Leadertalk today that might pep you for our first day back with kids.  Enjoy, and tell me what you think! I can help you set up a reader if you’d like….

http://www.leadertalk.org/2007/08/fighting-the-fl.html

80%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Dating Site

Friday (yesterday) at school we had a day long staff development (last day before our kids return Monday) to review the faculty handbook, the school discipline plan, and our summer reading project, What Great Teachers Do Differently. We had a great conversation aout this book, and we studied our behavior plan (PBIS–which stands for Positive Behavior Interventions & Support) as it related to this book.  I was not familiar with PBIS, but from what I have learned through this staff development, it is really good and can be effective if implemented consistently.  What I like is a grid or table that gives student expectations and it lists just about every “school place” a student may find themselves in (like hallways, playgrounds, classroms, lunchrooms, labs, gym, auditorium, locker room, I could go on….)

The teachers want “science labs” added for safety reasons and so that students will know what is expected there as well.  The grid lists behaviors for each location as it relates to respecting self, respecting others, respecting  the facility, and another category. (I don’t have my sheet in front of me.) But match the labels, like respect others/cafeteria, and you find a general statement like “use inside voices.”

I know it sounds complicated, but the school is in year 3 of using this program, and the faculty seems to believe in it. This tells me they are seeing results. The teacher buy-in is there.  One of the elementary feeder schools began using it last year, and so it must be something popular.

The biggest dilemma that came up was how to keep students from counterfeiting a component of the award system, which includes giving out “paws bucks.” Apparently some pretty slick students begn generating their own via copier/scanners at home.  So the satff had to come up with a way.  There was talk of using “invisible ink” to authenticate the bucks, but I was called away to deal with a technical issue and didn’t hear the final say. I guess I’ll have to ask someone later.

I was excited to receive my teacher handbook (ha,ha, I bet not many can say that) so that I could learn a little more about the logisitics of how the school operates on a day to day basis.  It will be riveting reading for me.  The principal claims she rewrote the entire document so that teacher expectations are clearly stated. (I gather there were things in the last book that were left for interpretation, and so some had misunderstandings regarding parts of the teacher handbook.)

Just before I left Friday, my principal assured me that I wouldn’t need to worry about students in the library next week, as every class will be teaching PBIS in their classes. There is even a lesson plan for every teacher for parts of PBIS, and everyone is to teach their assigned part. This will show kids that everyone is doing the same thing.  And all will get instruction on basic student expectations. It is a two week lesson plan. So I suppose I will work hard to get the library looking ship shape and continue with halping teachers with their technical issues.

Friday night I met my family in Columbia for the South Pointe-Irmo game, and hooray, SP won!  I also got to sit with a teacher from my old school, so it was nice to catch up with her.  Now I will enjoy a weekend with my family and next weekend, they will come to the beach to spend it with me. They will bring the dog, Sandy to!! Life is good! (Sandy is our yellow lab who went  through mournng when we sold our house last November and she lost her swimming pool, big yard, and personal pond.  She had to adjust to indoor apartment life and a leash back then. Lost most of her freedoms, as she understood life, including the doggy-door to come and go.  Poor Sandy.

This concludes SYP, Day 6.

There will be no more titles of posts as SYP.  I cannot shake the feeling that my use of “SYP” sounds like a complaint.  I will continue to share findings in my new job here, as it is rather cleansing to blog and reflect on what I accomplish or learn each day in my job.  The heading of a post as SYP justs nags at me that it may have a negative connotation, and the casual reader won’t know what that is anyway.  So from this post forward, I will come up with different headings, but I will continue to tag these with “SYP,” which stands for School Year Project…Thanks for letting me get that OFF my chest.

Okay prepare yourself.  Here are 2 pictures of the books that were weeded from the library.

I am lucky in that my school has the remote “Panther” scanner, and so it was a breeze to scan all 431 books pictured here.  We are only about a fourth of the way through here too.  It’s scary to realize that many books are leaving the library.  But they must go.  I plan to run an analysis soon after weeding to see what effect it has on my age of the collection. I’m not expecting miracles or dramatic improvements, but I should see a significant difference.  I am hoping for an improvement of five years (from average copyright date of 198 to 1993). If that happens I will be PLEASED as punch!

We had open house toight, but thankfully the library was closed. It still resembles a minor disaster area.  I was trained today to use the TekNet video distribution system.  I hope I can remember all that. It seems complicated, and I have to train teachers!  One day at a time…one day at a time.

Several of the teachers have begun talking to me. I am so blessed that they are being patient with me.  Today is the first time I feel like I accomplished ANYTHING!  One more day and then kids come back (Monday.)   I hope I am ready.