Reflection

With three children under the age of five running through the house, my home can often resemble the streets of Pamplona after the running of the bulls- chaotic, disheveled, a plain mess. So after my children are asleep, my brain scattered by the disarray, I employ my tried and true method for tidying- I work from left to right around the room. This logical progression helps me feel less overwhelmed and little by little, lego by lego, my family room begins to emerge, a couch resurfaces, and I can sit and relax for a while before it all begins again. Organization isn’t easy and just as my brain feels discombobulated by chaos in my environment, the process of building a library website and attempting to organize for my users the multitude of information on web, left my head spinning! But through the tornado of information overload I held on tight to the reason why I embarked on the endeavor in the first place, to provide better access to resources for my clientele.

Why a build a library webpage anyway? There are several good reasons why a strong virtual library should be an integral part of the school library. First of all, if I feel overwhelmed by information on the web, so do my students. “The school virtual library offers young people both independence and intervention, guiding learners through the complicated and often overwhelming processes of finding and using information. Librarians can tame the information chaos that students may experience by providing customized, user-centered interfaces that create order as they offer instruction” (Valenza, 2006, p.54). Moreover, virtual spaces allow for a 24/7 service, expand the walls of the library reaching more users, and have the potential to make our “…classrooms become as big as the world” (Kist, 2010, p.1) through web-based resources that enhance the curriculum. Finally, as I mentioned in my Plan, my own research and that of others shows students turn to the internet first for their information needs; teacher librarians must respond by meeting students in their world.

So how does one go about building a strong virtual library? I very quickly learned “…that building a good, usable, accessible, attractive school website that meets the needs of students and teachers is every bit as difficult and as complicated as building a good, usable, accessible, attractive school building that meets the needs of students and teachers” (Walbert, 2010). With this in mind, I followed Walbert’s suggestions to “Keep it simple!” and attempted to organize the content logically, maintaining at the forefront a goal impressed upon in LIBE 465- that the site should be user-centered. For this reason, I chose to really limit the main the headings across the navigation bar on the front page to five choices: Students, Teachers, Parents, Subjects and Blog. Instead of having too much information on the front page, I opted to have scroll down tabs under the major headings with topics that I felt would meet the needs of the community such as Research Skills, Web 2.0 tools and Great Reads for students. However, I plan to conduct a library use survey in the fall to better assess the needs of the community and help me determine further resources to add. I also appreciated my professor’s suggestion “…to take a moment (if possible) to sit down with a teen… and get their insights into what would make this new online resource a more powerful tool” and to “…consider having students help in the development of this tool…” (K. McPherson, personal communication, July 16, 2012); both suggestions I hope to employ.

The area where I struggled the most was organizing the subject resource links. Walbert writes, “Content is king! (Or queen)” (Walbert, 2010) and I quickly became aware that my virtual library needed more meat. But searching to evaluate and find credible, quality, and relevant resources to support and enhance the curriculum proved more challenging than I expected. It was very time consuming and revealed to me that I need a much stronger grasp of the school curriculum. Working at the middle school level the last six years, I find myself quite in the dark about the secondary curriculum. Therefore, before September I plan to create a curriculum map of main topics taught at each grade level for every subject to use as a guide for acquiring both print and non-print resources. I also need to review criteria for assessing websites myself and post useful resources for this, such as Joyce Valenza’s CARRDSS system, on the web page for users to see. Finally, I grouped the resources by general databases for each subject, followed by alphabetized topical lists at each grade level. As I begin to collect more web resources, a topical method of organization may become too cluttered. For now I like it, as the topics listed also give students some search term ideas to work with when they use the more general databases themselves and having all the grade levels on one page allows for cross-grade use of the resources.

One way I hope to help teachers in my school reach learning goals and objectives presented by the BC ministry of Education and the school mission is to encourage collaboration in the area of resource development. When I first assessed the library home page on Destiny, I questioned the former librarian on why the only subject section listed was for Social Studies 9. She explained that a specific teacher had requested those resources be compiled on the site. This shows me that the there is a spark of desire in the teachers to have quality web-resources that support the curriculum. My hope is that the library use survey, the contact feature on the web-site, and simply informal interactions with teachers will result in more input from them on resources and collaboration on the whole. Since, “[o]ver forty years of studies across dozens of jurisdictions have demonstrated that the synergy of classroom teachers working with qualified teacher-librarians significantly improves student achievement” (BCTLA, 2010).

In attempts to improve access to resources for all my users I did a few very specific things, but realize I still have a ways to go. I attempted to choose a simple and easy to remember URL: rcsslibrary.weebly.com, but would consider purchasing my own URL to eliminate the “weebly” or finding a Canadian based platform in the future that better supports BC privacy laws. I also included a few links to the library catalog throughout the site and inserted a tutorial on how to upload the destiny app to a mobile phone, giving users another means of accessing library resources, but realize direct instruction on using these would be of great value to the students. I attempted to use Zoom Search to  insert a search feature onto the homepage to increase user access to the information on the site, but couldn't figure it out; I plan to ask the school IT to help me do this. Finally, David Loertscher’s article, “Flip This Library: School Libraries Need a Revolution” really challenged me to consider how I might “…offer two-way communication…” (Loertscher, 2008) on the website. I started small by adding a contact feature linked to my school email that allows readers to send suggestions, questions, comments. This is an area I need to explore further and expand, perhaps through the integration of a library wiki or student driven page of some sort. 

I will not lie, throughout the process I wanted to give up, felt unbelievably overwhelmed and in over my head, doubted my abilities and even questioned why I had bitten off this task in the first place. But I truly do believe that maintaining a strong virtual presence and helping students navigate through “…a sea of information, not all of which is reliable” (BCTLA, 2010), is one of the key reasons why teacher-librarians are so vital to schools. As Ned Potter in The Time for Libraries is Now  writes about librarians, "We used to be the information vault, now we've become the launch pad.” I desire my library web-page to be a launch pad for thoughtful, engaged, collaborative learning and realize that this is a work in the making.

Works Cited: 

British Columbia Teacher-Librarian's Association. (2010). BCTLA Position Statement: School Library Programs, Teacher-Librarians and Effective Teaching and Learning. Retrieved from http://bctf.ca/bctla/pub/index.html

Kist, W. (2010). The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Loertscher, D. (2008). Flip This Library: School Libraries Need a Revolution. School Library Journal. Retrieved from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6610496.html

Potter, N. (2011). The Time for Libraries is Now [online slides]. Retrieved from SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/thewikiman/the-time-for-libraries-is-now

Valenza, J. (2006). The Virtual Library. Educational Leadership. 63(4), 54-59.

Walbert, D. (2010) Best Practices in school library website design. Learn NC. Retrieved from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/969