Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

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.

Database. Such an intimidating word. Most states provide a portal to a list of subscription databases, and I have colleagues who SWEAR by them (Joyce Valenza, Boris Bauer). I can remember sitting in a SCASL conference session several years ago and hearing Boris say, “If you are not offering your users databases, you are doing them a huge disservice.” Edtech Talk webcast show Teachers Teaching Teachers had a three week discussion on the virtues of databases, and how to get our users to utilize the resources. the consensus was we need to make the db sexier to our students. I agree with this, and do feel that if our state subscriptions had the look and feel of Google, they would NOT be such a hard sell. I also think if we sell them to teachers too, perhaps the trickle down effect will transform the students into devoted users. So HOW do we do this? I think the answer is in collaboration with teachers, and our educating our teachers on the usefulness of the clunky, cumbersome tools. Since we cannot convert the subscription databases to a “sexy” mass-appealing simple look and feel, we can create pathfinders that list all the resources for a topic of study that includes books, videos, persons, places, and egads, “databases” (along with search strategies for those databases) in these pathfinders. The homepage of the actual pathfinder can have lettering and simple white backgrounds with the familiar plain lettering in googlized technocolor–a way to surely GRAB the attention of our google freaks everywhere! Soon my school district is changing over to a a new web interface for creating online presence. I am waiting patiently to have web presensence. I am going to googlize the whole concept of pathfinders. Wait and see.