Nov 10 2007
#5 Empty, empty shelves (Week 3)
These are some of my fiction stacks. (H-Z to be exact.) Yes, they are dreadfully empty. Both the top and bottom shelves are always empty. The last two sections of shelving are completely empty. I’ve spoken with someone about creating some decorative banners to go above the fiction, non-fiction, and reference stacks as well as ones for the circulation desk and book return cart.
We had a meeting yesterday about the library budget and I’m optimistic that we’ll get some additional funding. We were armed with statistics about the number of books per student and the average age of the collection. I hope that the board will be receptive to expanding the per student expenditure—which is currently $7.24. I’ve been somewhat fortunate because of my aggressive weeding, it’s been clear to the superintendent and business manager that the library needed some added funds, so they’ve been working with me and adding some extra money to my budget to help recoup some of the loss to the size of my collection.
I’ve been using Flickr for personal photos for about two years now, I think. In September, I upgraded to a paid account so that I can upload an unlimited amount of pictures and have an unlimited number of photo sets. One really neat thing that you can do with Flickr is to make notes about a photo right on it. I’ve joined a few groups: a “swaparooni” group (color-based gift swaps), a free knitting patterns group, and with this Flickr exercise, I learned about the libraries and librarians group and added my library pictures to that group.
Although I haven’t heard you say much about it on the WOTH board, from your blog it seems like you’re really struggling to improve the library. This is a middle school, right? I guess I don’t remember using the library much at that age (although I always loved to read) but I also don’t ever recall bare shelves. Is your district really struggling? Elementary too?
Well, our elementary libraries seem to be in relatively good shape—collections are a little old (about 17-20 years) guidelines are for not more than 15 years but books per student range from 23-32 with a standard recommendation of 25 per student.
I think I stopped using the library in high school. In junior high, we had a study hall in the library and I was a reader so I used it—I think I was even a library aide and got a letter for it, come to think about it! After my high school experience, I had no interest in becoming a school librarian—but it was one of my ideas when I was in junior high. I ended up working in a public library when I dropped out of college because I just couldn’t see myself as an elementary teacher (what I went to school for originally). That experience brought me back to my love of libraries and made me vow to do better than some of my experiences (junior high was definitely my best school library experience—elementary and high school left a lot to be desired.)
Our high school is probably in the worst shape of the schools. They’ve got about 13 books per student and an average copyright of 1978. We’ve got three middle schools whose copyrights are between 1988 and 1992 (mine) but books per student are 10, 11, and 24. Minimums for secondary level are 15, standard is 20, exemplary is 25. It’s quite a range, isn’t it?
My biggest frustration is really drawing teachers in to use the library. I’ve got a lot of materials to meet the curriculum for the teachers who do use the library. I’ve bought books to support our science fair, but not one science teacher has brought their students in to look at the materials.
The school made some changes in our daily schedule this year and my circulation has skyrocketed. Students have borrowed over 2700 books in the first 9 weeks of school. In the past, my circulation for the year hasn’t exceeded 7000, so this is really good news in my view. I don’t know how many of the books are actually being read, but they’re borrowing them and that’s a start!
This year, in addition to my per pupil expenditure (the $7.24/student) I’ve got $9000 to update my fiction, literature, and arts sections. This will help a lot, but there’s still a ways to go because of how neglected this library was for too long.
When I started four years ago, the average age of a book was 1965! Nearly every shelf was stuffed to the gills with books, but no one was really reading them because they couldn’t find the good books because of all the old books that were on the shelves. At that time, the two rows of shelves that run down the center of the room were four rows, and the back half of each of those rows were as tall as the shelving on the walls. We eliminated the tall shelves altogether and consolidated the low shelves into two rows. It’s made the library brighter and the room more visible and more easily monitored. But it’s still pretty empty.
At the beginning of last year, I had just under 9 books per student, and now I’ve got just over 10 books per student. Some of that is also due to a drop in enrollment, but things are getting better slowly.