Last Blog - 4/13 - 4/17

This week I have been working to complete all the work I have to do.  This has been an incredible journey learning the inner working of the media center and dealing with the challenges at hand.  Technology is certainly becoming a major focus at our school as we begin next week taking the Georgia Milestones test completely online.  We will be one of the first school systems to go completely online with the testing.  This I am sure will have major implications for library media specialists in the future.  I have certainly learned a lot from my mentor Ms. Peters.  One of the biggest things I have learned is that I do not know it all and it will take time to learn if I ever get the chance to work in the media center.  I will make sure to bring my passion for reading, working with students, and technology when that time comes.  Take care.  RR

Checklist Item 1 - Thematic Display

The thematic display using technology was done to encourage students to read!  Throughout the school students are given their lexile scores along with goals to improve upon their lexile abilities. In this display we took popular books that are frequently checked out and gave the students alternate books to read, thus the title.  If the students enjoyed reading a certain book, that book is linked to a similar book.  An interesting twist to this is that I used the app Aurasma and tablets located in the media center so that the students could actually view the book trailer on the new book.  Aurasma is an augmented reality app that brings things to life.  For a tutorial click here.

Checklist Item 5 - Media Center Activities Report

This checklist item was fun to complete.  I used Venngage to create the inforgraphic for the activities in the Camden Middle School media center for the month.  Some of the data was surprising to me.  I was surprised that the top three books checked out were all from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.  Number of visitors also was much higher than most people realized.  Finally, library fines or amount owed is very high.  These kinds of infographics can easilyl allow people to see what is going on in the media center.

Checklist Item 6 - County Level Meeting and Reflection week of 3/13 - 3/17

I attended the county Library Media Specialist meeting for Camden County Schools.  As you might imagine the agenda at this meeting was quite large so I will blog about the highlight and things that struck me as important in this meeting.  Much of the beginning of the meeting went over many web 2.0 apps that are available to the school systems teachers and media specialists.  Some of the apps on display are below:

●     TLDR - a reading app that shortens or summarizes articles for students

●     Instagrok - mind mapping tool for students

●     Plickers - a cool student response tool

●     Kahoot - a student interactive teaching/review game.  Kids love it!

●     MyOn - an electronic library of books for kids.  This is a really nice one

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Also mentioned was a GLMA workshop slated for June that some members were going to attend for professional learning.  Media specialists discussed problems they are having with barcode scanners and possible solutions to those problems.  Media specialist were told to pay close attention to check outs because books were not being properly picked up by the scanners.  Camden County library media specialist handled tech support so issues such as chrome book fixes along with other issues were discussed. 

As mentioned earlier, there was quite an agenda and it was interesting to see issues that were faced with different schools while at the same time the schools faced many of the same issues.  In any event, the LMS of all schools must work together to ensure that all students in the county are served correctly.  These county meetings are essential to the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the libraries in Camden County.

Checklist Item 2 - School level meeting and Reflection week of 3/2 - 3/6

This week I attended the school level meeting with the CMS media committee.  The meeting began with a discussion of the school book fairs along with the goals for the months that the book fair will be going on in.  Other topics were collaboration with teachers and the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl.  Our librarian wants to increase the amount of collaboration between the media specialist and the teachers in the school.  Weeding and collection updating was discussed.  We identified sections that need to be weeded and updated in order to keep the collection up to date.  One other thing of note is that our school is moving to a system having all students use their lexile levels for reading.  Because of this our library has put lexiles in all of the books so that students check out books based on their personal scores.  We discussed how this process is working and it was determined that teachers, students, and the media center were all benefiting from the new process. The last item discussed was the budget.  Our media center has a budget of $13,000 for the year.  Of that number we have set aside $5,665 for books and $4,100 for supplies.  We will use these funds to update the collection and purchase needed supplies for the next school year.

Checklist Item 3 - Weeding and Reflection week 2/23 - 2/27

    

Weeding

   This week in the media center I have taken on the task of weeding.  I went to Ms. Peters and told her that I would like to learn to weed a section of our media center and she gladly put me to work.  The first thing we did was to go in to Destiny and run a report on all of the books listed in the section that she wanted me to weed.  She chose section 921 which are biographies.  The report yielded a little over 4,000 books in the section but she informed me that many of the books needed to go.  Ms. Peters advised me to use Karen Lowe’s method of determining which books needed to be taken out of this section and replace.   The inventory report provided me with a list of all the books in the section along with publication dates and the number of times the book has been checked out.  I began with all books published in 1995 and older because we want a current collection dating back twenty years.  I then cross referenced this with books that had 2 or less checkouts since they have been in the library.  

    As I went through the books I performed a physical inspection on the books as taken from the MUSTY method.  I thoroughly went through the books looking for physical condition, relevance to the collection, up to dateness among others to determine if the book was worth keeping.  The most difficult part of the process was pulling books off the shelf that look practically brand new to be thrown away.  I was told this happens a lot with biographies due to the nature of the collection.  Many of the biographies do not circulate much so there is hardly any wear and tear on these books.  In any event, we are taking books out of the collection and replacing them with more modern, popular people.

    The last part of the process is discarding the books.  We removed all of our CMS labels from the books and boxed them up to be thrown away.  I also went into Destiny and removed the books from the collection.  As mentioned earlier, this was the hardest part of the entire task.  My next part will entail finding new books to replace the ones I removed.

Books that have been weeded

My inventory list of the 921 section

    

Checklist Item 4 - Cataloging

Cataloging is a very important aspect of the library media center.  It is vital that all materials and equipment be cataloged and placed into the Destiny system so they can be monitored and accounted for.  My direct media specialist Ms. Peters is very detailed with anything she puts into the Destiny system.  She has shown me the way that she does it and she has let me know the reasons for being so detailed when putting material into the system.  Her collection grades out at 98% and she is very proud of that.  Cataloging is not that difficult on most items, it just takes practice.  Many items have MARC records that come from vendors and that is fine, but Ms. Peters always adds things to the MARC record that she likes.  Non fiction is the most challenging of the books that I logged because you have to have some extras put into the MARC records so that it makes it easy for students to find information.  Most of the non fiction did not take a lot of time at all. Overall I am still learning but I am making progress!