Hello World (Again)

This is my letter of intent. Today is the day that I gleefully wipe the dust off of this old book blog, and reinvent it! I began this blog in 2014 as a class assignment in my Young Adult Literature class. I was attending Drexel to earn my Masters in Science in Library & Information Science Degree. In 2015 I earned my degree and started working as a school librarian………… Fast forward 3 years and its now 2018! I have been a school librarian for 3 years and now (finally!) feel I have my feet under me enough to attempt to keep up with a blog. Yay!  But I’m going to reinvent it from a book blog over to a Librarian Blog.

So, going forward this blog will hopefully be full of reflections on my adventures as a High School Librarian. I hope these reflections and ruminations will be helpful to other librarians, educators, information professionals, library students, etc. But if not, it will certainly be helpful to me as I’d like to be able to look back in future and actually remember some of the outrageous fun I’m having as a librarian. So here we go!

The posts to come after this should be more interesting and include pictures and actual lesson plans, programming plans, etc. This is just a statement of intent. I’ve opened the can of worms officially now 🙂

****Posts after this one on my home screen are leftovers from the olden days when it was a book blog. I didn’t see any reason to delete the old posts so I’m leaving them. ****

Here’s some pictures of what my library looked like the day I started. Wait until you see all the changes I’ve made since then …. woooo it has been a fun 3 years!

And heres a list of some of the projects I’ve tackled in the last two years at my HS Library:

Year One:

• Collection Dev: Added LGBTQIA+ collection
• Collection Dev: Added Graphic Novel collection
• Collection Dev: Added Books in Spanish collection
• Physical Space & Rules: Moving from “silent library” to “learning commons” format (i.e. not a quiet library)
• Collection Dev: Started Weeding Fiction (gentle, timid to start)
• Collection Dev: Started Genre-fying (research & genre selection)
• Instructional Goals: Trying to get teachers to collaborate (first year is tough!)

Year Two

• Community Building – Social Media accounts – Instagram & Twitter
• Community Building – Games & Cards
• Community Building – Community Coloring sheets
• Community Building – Community Puzzle
• Collection Dev: Partially Genre-fied (stickered each book but kept in dewey layout for now)
• Collection Dev: Added series labels to all fiction books (SOOO helpful!)
• Collection Dev: Added ebooks collection
• Collection Dev: Researching potential databases to add or change for next year
• Physical Space – Massive shifting of every book in the library to conserve and restructure floor space availability
• Physical Space – Big push for adding color and decorations to our previously stark library.
• Instructional: Saw a serious increase in collaborative opportunities, especially with social studies and english.
• Instruction/Collaboration/Reading: Started the Roaming Library  program where each month I bring a cart of books to the classrooms for on the spot check out.

Year Three (That’s this year)

• Instruction/Leadership: Offering PD sessions at in-services (Fake News/News Literacy Focus)
• Instruction: # of collaboration requests has skyrocketed already this year (and its only october!) YAY! More requests from Science dept. than previous years, several social studies and english have asked for Fake News collaborations.
• Community Building – Still big focus on Instagram & Twitter
• Leadership: Several staff members asking me for advice on running a school social media account.
• Leadership: Cross-school collaborations – worked with middle school librarian to bring News Literacy lessons to her 7th grade social studies classes.
• Leadership/Prof Development: Accepted by AASL to run a webinar on Fake News in 2 weeks!
• Collection Dev: Finished Ruthless Weed of Fiction (yay!)
• Collection Dev: Began Ruthless Weed of Nonfiction
• Collection Dev: Began researching new physical nonfiction books to add as collection is weeded down.
• Collection Dev: New Databases added (Gale), old ones removed
• Community Building – Added more games & collaborative activities thanks to a grant
• Community Building – Added a Daily Riddle & Trivia boards
• Physical Space – New lounge furniture added (thanks to monetary donation)
• Physical Space – Restructuring of space, many large stacks were moved allowing us to have a second lounge area = multi-spaces now! More usable space!
• Collection/Physical Space: We are gearing up to do the full on genre-fication next week! Books will be moved into their genre groups!
• Leadership/Instruction: collaborating with colleagues on their SLOs and Growth plans.