Friday, November 16, 2007

CSLA, Day 2 (Post 4)

I went to see Helen Cox (Hamilton Middle, Long Beach USD) present "Get Rid of It, Get over it, Get with it: Creating a Scholarly Environment. The basic idea is to take a library that does not present itself well and change it into one that does. She says:

"The modern school library needs to be dynamic and current in order to attract teens."

So true. One important handout she gave asked us to answer these questions:

Do you have...
1. READ posters that are more than five years old?
2. Dust on the bottom shelf of every bookcase?
3. Books that are copyrighted 1989 or older?
4. Dirty ceilings?
5. Unwashed floors.
6. Tape residue on bookcases, tables, desks, walls, doors?
7. A laminator machine or other equipment used primarily by teachers?
8. Furniture that is scratched and drawn on?

And more. My goal for this conference was to bring two things back. This is the first one. Making your library look like a library that wants to have students is a good place to start.

2 comments:

Marie Slim said...

I went to this session too. Isn't she inspiring? Of course I wish I had one milligram of her artistic talent. But I'm ready to go back and weed, weed, weed!

slimlibrary.blogspot.com

Jeff and Yvonne Weinstein said...

I missed this session..... hope that my partner caught it - our library is in desperate need of deep cleaning by the two of us. Weeding as well as polishing....