Anne Johnston's Library Blog

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See Taggart last Friday night? An interesting twist on the middle-aged librarian who still lives with his mum stereotype. No, still not the rant about stereotyping. One line made me giggle. The gist was that fraternising with one's colleagues is disapproved of in the library service. This set me off thinking about various websites which use humour to shed an insight into the world of libraries.

For an insider's view of customer relations try If you don't want it, the library doesn't want it or for "hard-core" library humour try Googling Lipstick Librarian or Librarian Avenger.

I particulary like this image which I came across recently at www.speedbump.com. Look for the section called "Are you a Librarian?".

The idea of a librarian as search engine brought to mind David Weinberger's session at SETT. It was called Everything is Miscellaneous and looked at new ways of organising and storing knowledge. He made a statement which keeps popping up in my head, especially when anyone mentions information literacy - Libraries separate ideas. Do they? and if they do is this a bad thing?

Apologies for the break in transmissions. I do intend to contribute to my blog more regularly than every 5 or 6 weeks. Not long after I posted the first entry my PC at home died quite suddenly after years of loyal service. At the same time we were experiencing network problems in school. Hence the gap of several weeks. I am about to try to set up wireless broadband tonight. I know the broadband works and since my PC can't sit in the kitchen beside the main phone line socket wireless it is.

I attended a wheen of meetings during September -all of them important and producing benefits for our students and staff - but I am looking forward to spending a whole week in my own school.

Priority for this week is promotion of C.R.A.W. Towards the end of last year we decided to merge our separate Creative Writing Group and our Reading Club into one mega-group. Students named it the Creative Reading and Writing Club. Craw members are currently reading the titles nominated in the Scottish Children's Book Awards. They will be casting their votes at the start of November. More details at Royal Mail Awards for Scottish Children's Books. They are also beginining to write a group novel. I missed the meeting where they started this so am looking forward to finding out about it next week. Mrs Aitken, Ms Dallas, Mr Earle and Ms Hall from the English department run Craw jointly with me.

S1 students are nearing the end of their library induction. Last week we were looking at the fiction books in the library and how we organise them on the shelves. This proved to be a very messy activity with lots of reshelving for me at the end of each lesson but students are enjoying sorting bundles of books and some students are borrowing some of the titles after their task is complete. It also provides an opportunity for me and the class teacher to engage students in informal discussions about their favourite reading.

On 27th Sept I attended an away day with the rest of the Glow mentors in East Lothian. We were able to discuss the SETT conference which most of us attended for two days the previous week and begin to look forward to the roll out of GLOW next year. Glow is proving to include much more that I expected. I knew about the actual online resource content and that students would be provided with e-mail but had not fully understood the intention to support classroom teachers with their necessary administrative work. East Lothian will be one of the schools piloting the Glow portal in a few weeks time.

The secondary school librarians met on 1st September to discuss practical matters related to PECOS, Talis (our automated library system) and the collections of books we are loaned annually from East Lothian Library Service. We also spent a fair amount of time examining in detail the success schools are having by issuing departmets' textbooks via the library. The system works well and is growing - like Topsy- and librarians are finding the demands on their time mean that difficultt decisions about priorities are having to be taken. This is one area where some clerical support for librarians would be invaluable.

On 4th September the local editorial group for 4u readers met to discuss progress and plan our next contributions to the website and our showcase of the site at Celebrating Success at the Brunton Hall on 29th Sept. The 4ureaders site is produced on a national basis by several authorities. Bill Plain, Librarian at Knox Academy, is doing a sterling job as co-ordinator for East Lothian. It is an online magazine for 10 to 14 year olds which encourages reading and gives young people the chance to contiribute pieces of original writing as well as reviews and suggestions for titles and items for inclusion Our stand at Celebrating Success proved popular with visitors, thanks to the efforts of Charlie and Stephen, two students at Preston Lodge, who did the bulk of the presentation and chat, and their Librarian, Linda Bain who made sure the technology worked.

On 6th September I attended my first meeting of the Strategic Learning and Teaching Group 3-18.in my capacity as School Librarian Field Officer with East Lothian Library Service. One of the projects arising from the work of this group is an intergated cross-curricular project currently called Extreme Learning. The majority of school librarians attended the launch of this project on 13th September. Many of the skills which this project is intended to improve for pupils fall within the remit and area of expertise of the librarian. We are looking forward to the opportunity to work with primary and secondary students and teaching colleagues.

Fortunately the Extreme Learning meeting was after school. In the morning all of the school librarians attended the termly meeting we have with senior staff from the East Lothian Library Service. These meetings allow us to discuss both professional and educational issues and share information and ideas. For example job evaluation/single status, Curriculum for Excellence, Information Literacy, Scottish Schools Digital Network aka Glow, CPD, promoting online resources, 4ureaders and Celebrating Success.

The S1 Open Evening took place at DGS on 28th September. I enjoy taking part in this evening. It is one of the few opportunities I have to meet parents and show them what the school library has to offer their children. The rest of the time I am usually contacting them about, late, lost or damaged stock. It is also fun when former students discover how the library has physically changed since they attended school - i.e twice the size with a lovely garden outside the window.

To finish this quick catch up a question from a student to one of our Chemistry teachers.

Does Miss Johnston have a Wednesday off?

Guess which day of the week most of the meetings took place! :-)

Monday saw the return of the students to DGS and the usual round of getting courses started. Only a few students came into the library at lunchtime – some of last year’s regulars and a few S1s.

On Tuesday the SMT and Guidance staff held a session in the Library for S6 students and cleared almost all course changes in one fell swoop. Whilst this was happening Andy Holmes, a Senior Librarian with East Lothian Library Service, visited me to demonstrate the upgraded backup system for the automated library system. We disconnected the issue desk PC to simulate loss of the connection and I learned all about Talis Assure. So far so good. Then we reconnected the PC so that I could see how the backup fed the information into the live system to discover that the live system had gone down during the time of the demo and stayed down for the rest of the afternoon. PCs 1, Librarian 0. Luckily no-one wanted to issue textbooks to their classes on Tuesday afternoon – the only time in the week this has happened. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, CDT, History and English all issue textbooks via the library system to keep track of their books. As you can imagine, the first week of a new school year is a particularly busy time for handing out books.

Wednesday morning and IT had worked their magic. The library system was back working and the backup system happily loaded up the loans details from the previous day. The Careers Adviser held her interviews and clinic in the library today. Normally she does this on a Tuesday but it worked out well as students were able to follow up on their meetings with SMT and Guidance the day before. I had a working lunch with Susan Aitken and Ciaran Earle from the English department to discuss how we are going to launch CRAW, the Creative Reading and Writing Group. In June we discussed the possibility of merging the Reading Club and the Creative Writing Club with the students who attended them. They liked the idea and came up with the new name. Next week the existing members, Susan, Ciaran and I will meet to decide on our plans for the group and how to invite new S1 students to join. Our group already has a visit by Keith Gray, the author, in the pipeline and will be taking part in the judging of the Children’s Scottish Book Awards. I met a whole S1 class for the first time today. I enjoyed chatting with them about their favourite authors or types of books (All S1 and S2 classes have a period a week in English timetabled for choosing books to read.)

Thursday was a particularly busy textbook day for Maths students. It was also the day I finally managed to make a start on preparing materials for a research project I am involved in with Andrew Thomson from the English department and Jim Herring who is now based in an Australian university but previously worked in Queen Margaret University College and Robert Gordon University. The aim of the research is to encourage students to develop effective information handling skills using a planning diary. DGS is one of many schools involved. I will be demonstrating online sources of information which our students can use. These include subscription services we have purchased and some that are provided by East Lothian Library Service. I also finalised arrangements for the S1 library induction course which will start the week of the 4th September and run until the start of October. The trickle of S1s visiting the library at lunchtime has now grown to a steady stream.

Friday I enjoyed a coffee in the sunshine at morning break on the staffroom balcony. Last period of the week an S4 English class researched topics for a discursive essay using printed sources as well as Internet based ones. New PCs were installed over the summer to replace aging Windows 95 machines. Students are very appreciative of the improvement. After they had gone I was able to complete the materials for the S2 class involved in the research project – a pack for each PC with log in details for the various online information sources and a leaflet of the same details for each student to take home. The students can access all of these sources from home, if they have the Internet available.

Finally my favourite questions of the week. From an S2 student waiting in a queue for a textbook: Do you ever get bored stamping out and taking back books all day? (I’ll save the rant about stereotyping for later) and from an anxious S1 student: Do you have to pay to take a book out?