Grant me a circulation desk

The Post Office closed today at 4:00 and I arrived promptly at 3:45 to mail off my application for the DEMCO/Betty Barkema School Library Improvement Grant.

When was it due?

April 30.

Yep, it was due today and I mailed it today. Thankfully, it just had to be postmarked today. The problem was one last letter of recommendation.

As for the process, completing the grant application has made me a better teacher-librarian. Really. What it took to pull it all together included creating a site library plan, a project description, multiple letters of recommendation, and creating a library advisory committee.

If I were teaching teacher-librarian credentialing courses, I would require that everyone complete this grant. You would not have to submit it (because it may not be appropriate for your setting), but the process was a learning experience all in itself.

I have asked for funding for a new circulation desk. The one we have is original to the school. My students deserve better. Sometimes the first step in creating a vibrant library program is just making it look like a vibrant library.

Finding your destiny (or is that Destiny)?

I spent last week going over to the dark side.

Yep.

I went to Follett Destiny training. Actually, I probably like it and I certainly think that it will be better than our older version of Alexandria.

The problems that I had and continue to have relate more to support by the district than any problem with Follett. Our district is doing a number of new and exciting things technologically speaking these days, so it is difficult to get staff time to pull it all together.

So I went to five days of circulation training and had no patrons. I still have no patrons. I also believe I discovered today that my scanner will not work with Destiny. Yes, it will read the barcode, but it will not correlate that number with the book.

And, yes, it will all work itself out.

What is a mashup? - ZDNet

Quote of the Week

"Cutting library funding is irrational. Study after study shows that better school libraries (more books, better staffing, the presence of a credentialed librarian) are related to better reading. It is hard to understand how this evidence can be ignored when we are so concerned about test scores and the use of scientific evidence as the foundation of school practice."


--Dr. Steven Krashen,
University of Southern California

Ten Favorite Public Libraries List

For those of us who are librarians in California, we should be asking ourselves why no California libraries made this list in USA Today:

10 Great Places to Find a Nook and Read a Book

It is the list of the ten favorite public libraries of NPR book commentator Nancy Pearl, author of Book Lust. While there are many reasons for why this might be, it does give me pause.

By the way, I saw an advertisement today for a position at this library that made the list.

Quote of the Week

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.


~~Barack Obama

Out with the new...

What's in that picture? Why, those are books. New or nearly new books that were thrown into a dumpster outside Intermediate School 73 in New York.

Now there could be any number of reasons for how they ended up in the dumpster. No good ones spring to mind, however.

The titles:

• Treasure Island
• Little Women
• Sarah, Plain and Tall
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Kidnapped

Education officials are investigating how this could have happened. At this point, it appears that it was not done by the teacher librarian, but that is only my guess based on the reading of the article.

If the school needed to get rid of the books, at the very least, I would think that they could have been given to students. Yes, they are older titles that are not read as much as they once were, but at my school, I would have had quite a few students who would be happy to get them.