My last day as a teacher at Skybridge: a reflection

Today was my last day as a teacher at Skybridge.

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There are too many words to fit the last three years into one basket of feelings. Instead, I will share this:

A few semesters ago, my students were having a real problem with negative self-talk and disclaiming their writing. “I was really tired when I wrote this/this isn’t very good/I don’t really know what I’m doing,” etc.

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To combat this, I introduced the self-deprecation jar.

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The rule of the jar is this: if you say something bad about yourself, you must write down three awesome things about yourself and put them in the jar. (The jar is covered with pictures of cows saying positive things that are also cow puns.)

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For some people, this was harder than it was for others.

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Others were just silly.

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And others embraced it wholeheartedly.

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(Even I got caught once or twice.)

Universally, it changed the language people used about themselves and their writing, both in the classroom and out. We adopted a culture of gleefully aggressive self-positivity. Multiple times I found myself, in graduate classes or peer groups, two hairs away from shouting “JAR!” when someone said something self-effacing.

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I asked the students what they wanted to do with the jar at the end of the semester. They had lots of ideas:

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…with an overwhelmingly predominant theme:

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But it made me sad to burn all of the genuinely great (and silly, and snarky) things they’d written about themselves. So as a concession, I bought a bunch of tiny jars. I wrote something awesome about each student in on a tiny slip of paper in tiny letters, and placed each one in a jar.

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Then strung them on copper wire and embroidery thread (to be necklaces or keychains or whatnot):

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 I know you can’t hold on forever. I know that teachers pass in and out of students’ lives. But for a little bit longer, at least, the kids will carry with them the fondness and wishes of someone who was lucky to be allowed into their lives, and was changed for the best because of it.

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And then… there it was.

The Skybrary.

Book displays: or, how to trick kids into picking up books

Okay, librarians. You’ve got a stellar collection and a devastatingly great catalog; your books are labeled and lined up on their shelves like little Dewey Decimaled soldiers. Now comes (yet another) fun part–how do you get those books into kids’ hands?

One of the most fun methods of book promotion for the crafty librarian is a book display! (Though it’s far from the only way–book talks, book clubs, movie tie-in nights and themed crafternoons are also heaps of fun, and super effective.) Any regular library user will be familiar: book displays are usually situated near the entrance of the library, the circulation desk, or near reading spaces, and are used to celebrate any theme or season–or just to get eyes on some little-loved titles–of the librarian’s choosing. Christmas? Book display! Superheroes? Book display! The color blue? ….BOOK DISPLAY!

“These books BLUE us away!” Image credit: pinterest.com

Displays are a great way to make your space attractive, to help your collection seem exciting (and relevant, if your displays tie in to a popular movie release or current event) and to draw user attention to showcased items. Librarians should strive to change displays frequently. If you’re feeling daunted or creatively challenged, never fear: there are boatloads of exciting display ideas from your fellows-in-cardigans. Check out just a few here:

http://librarydisplays.org/
https://www.ebscohost.com/novelist/novelist-special/twenty-rules-for-better-book-displays
https://www.pinterest.com/jyhslibrary/library-display-ideas/
https://www.pinterest.com/awnali/library-display-ideas/

At Skybridge, we don’t have a ton of space, so my first display in the fiction library showcased one book each for ten different fiction genres. In theory, this allows for appeal to a wide range of students.

The genres: realistic fiction, mystery, fantasy, suspense, historical fiction, science fiction, humor, romance, dystopia and LGBTQ.

But oh, if we had the space, what wonders we could wreak! *Unnecessary side note: in writing this post, I learned that there is no present tense of the word wrought (it is an orphan of linguistic evolution, the past tense of a now archaic present tense word meaning work). Libraries! You never quit learning. Dazzle yourself with these beauties:

There are so many great display ideas that my wishlist file for this post costs more memory than my family’s first computer had. (Image credit: Winter Park Public Library.)

Fabulous Banned Books Week display. (Image credit: yaketyaks.com)

Lots of libraries will do “blind date” displays with books, especially around Valentine’s Day. (Image credit: snippetsofsheila.wordpress.com)

My anaconda don’t want none unless you got Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, hon. (Image credit: pinterest)

Steampunk! (image credit: gplteensblog.wordpress.com)

Spooky, scary. (Image credit: librarydisplays.org)

One last one! I couldn’t resist. Image credit: https://ochslibrary.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/book-displays-for-march-april/

What’s your favorite book display idea? Share below!

Cataloging and the startling beauty of organization

Blessed be the catalogers. They do, despite public knowledge (see assumption: librarian = “lady who checks out books at the desk and says ‘shh,'”), exist. I follow a number of them on Twitter—they’re a hard-working, lovely, clever bunch, keeping the clockwork heart of the library ticking away smoothly and giving us all an order that lets us all sort our heads from our feet and breathe a little easier. They also do a job that—bless them—can seem dauntingly complex and more than a little bit dull. I don’t know how they do it. I’m just happy that they exist.

They also have INDISPUTABLY EXCELLENT HAIR; there is a lot to admire about catalogers. (image credit: mediawiki.middlebury.edu)

If you use an amateur cataloging software, chances are very good that you’ll be doing what’s called copy-cataloging rather than original cataloging. This is what it sounds like: rather than making up your own records for materials, you’ll find and pull in someone else’s. Don’t worry, it’s not cheating. It’s common practice, like the way programmers will use chunks of other people’s code.

Same laser-like focus, slightly less excellent hair. (Sorry, programmers.) (Image credit: imasters.expert.)

The software I used did allow me to copy-catalog records for most of my books, pulling them from the Library of Congress and Amazon. (In fact, I cataloged only one item, a brochure on a chicken breed called Silkies from the American Bantam Association.) (I am absurdly proud of this record.)

I can even. But I don’t need to. (image credit: pinterest.com)

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my resource post, many records came in incomplete. Namely, a large number lacked Dewey call numbers.

Unexpected challenge #301: Learning to hunt down Dewey call numbers. As explained on the excellent Librarians Unite!, there’s no comprehensive database listing every Dewey call number. They recommend, instead, the following:

This is how we determine what number we will use. 1.       In a new book, the Library of Congress information is often printed in the front of the book. This is the first place to start. The suggested Dewey number will be at the end of the listing and will be a 3 digit number, possibly followed by a decimal and further digits.  If this number suits your organizational system, use it. 2.       Check in your own system. If it’s a book about elephants, and you already have another book about elephants, use the same number so they will be together on the shelf. 3.       Check with other libraries to see how they number the book.  You can search for books here  http://www.worldcat.org/ and then look for how libraries number them. 4.       Try to use the general Dewey Decimal system to determine where the book will fit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes#700-799_.E2.80.93_Arts http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/summaries/

Slowly but surely, the collection began to take shape. This most dramatically affected the nonfiction, which up until this point had been sorted by one category only: er… not fiction. Bit by bit, agriculture began to separate itself from religion. The biographies of Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton nestled up side by side. Our director, walking by the shelf, exclaimed, “Oh, I love this book!” and “Oooh, we have that?”

When I was young, my mom was always infuriated by what she called my dad’s “gray” messes. A gray mess was when there were so many different things jumbled together than none of them were distinguishable anymore: nails and pennies and Band-Aids and hair ties and outlet covers and bottle caps and guitar picks… it all averaged out to gray. When our shelves looked like this:

…it was impossible to see what we had (except for the SAT prep books, because they are purple behemoths) (NOBODY WANTS TO SEE YOU ANYWAY, SAT BOOKS). Dewey’s not a perfect system, but as the chaos began to settle, the collection began to seem like… a collection.

Displays help, too. We’ll talk about them later.

I also had a lot of fun with my catalog. You make the catalog? You make the entries. Which means, for my users, a few Easter eggs:

(There’s also one record in the system that promises the students that I’ll eat my hat if any of them ever checks that book out.) (AHAHAHA YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT, KIDDOS.)

xx,
k

Physical processing, and realizing that It Is All Bigger Than Me

About three days into this project, I found myself staring at the spines of the books in bafflement. I’ve worked in libraries before, both public and technical services. Thousands of books have passed through my hands—for all intents and purposes, I thought, I was a pro! No sweat! Libraries? I can library the heck out of this library! I can… I can….

Not figure out how on earth they get the labels onto the books.

It’s embarrassingly basic, but it had never occurred to me before. The books I’d worked with in my past library jobs came already physically processed, either by an active preservation department or (as seems to be the increasing trend) by a vendor. By “physically processed,” I mean: the book cover was laminated (or transformed into that monolithic monochrome of which university libraries seem so fond); there was a spine label on the book’s side; stamps on the top and cover page; and a barcode on the back. In short: the book was physically ready to go; I just had to enter some information about it into the computer and it was basically shelf-ready.

But doing it myself! This was a new thing entirely. I crawled around on the internet a bit, found nothing expressly useful, and finally just got old-fashioned and pulled out a ruler, feeling like a veritable Laura Ingalls Wilder of the physical processing librarianship world. I measured the spine label of a nearby book, and placed an order for self-adhesive labels. (You can find the specifications for them in the RESOURCES entry. I also made a template for them, which I’m happy to share—shoot me a comment below.) Then I shot a bear, rendered the lard with Pa, and we all sat around the fire with our newly labeled books and prayed for good plowing weather.

Choosing a Font: In Which I Am the Invisible Hand It’s startling to realize how many decisions influence every item you encounter, every day, that you completely take for granted. Look at the back of your shampoo bottle. Somebody chose the margins for the ingredients list. Somebody else put a lot of time and thought into the pattern on the box spring of your mattress. The human thought that has gone into every object you interact with every day is so baffling that it’s impossible to consider. It’s even more shocking when you find yourself on the other side of that divide–which, in making a library, you will. Look around your space. You know all of those decisions that seem completely arbitrary? Somebody has to make them, and that somebody–dizzyingly, wonderfully–is you. For me, this moment arrived when I sat down to type up my first(!) spine label and realized… I didn’t know what font it should be. And more than that, there was no font it “should be.” There was the font that I (not a graphic designer) was going to decide that it was, because I was the DIY librarian, and there was no one else to make this decision. It was stunning and beautiful and silly and a little heady. Because let’s be honest: is the shelf label font something that the students will care, or even think, about? No. But it is something that they’ll interact with every single day—and that will be, on a subconscious level, a small element in their greater conception of what a library is and how it should look and behave. It’s not just the difference between Times and Comic Sans. It’s the creation of the identity of something that will live (hopefully) far beyond you and (even more hopefully) lodge like a small tender seed in your students’ hearts. (In the end, we went with Arial Bold, size 11.)

Using the call numbers generated by my catalog, I printed the labels and placed them on the books. Then I put the books in order, and….

(Insert the singing of an angelic choir.)

I am being real with you, future-librarians: this was a deeply emotional moment. Stepping back and looking at my first shelf of spine-labeled books, I had the sudden sense that there was an undercurrent in the library that hadn’t been there before. Not just a sense of authority or validity: a sense of belonging. Looking at these books, presented the way I’ve seen books presented in libraries my entire life, it felt suddenly like the books did not belong to me. Like, instead, they belonged to Libraries Generally: a sense of something greater, bigger, more active and vast and alive than just me and my little school on the edge of the Texas hill country.

Or maybe like this. (image credit: think-tankworks.com)

It’s very difficult to explain.

An exceedingly dull post about technical processing

Every new project requires that you reinvent the wheel a number of times; the smaller and more specific the project, the funkier and more esoteric your wheel. Inventing the technical processing wheel was, for me, time-consuming and occasionally headache-inducing. If you’ve been following the project step by step and are ready to catalog your own books in Readerware, congratulations! I’ve invented the wheel for you. It looks like this:

Not like this. This will not get your books processed. (image credit: accessnorton.com)

(If you’re not, please go outside/read a book/write a letter to a friend. What follows is, though useful, very technical and EXTREMELY NOT FUNNY. xx, k)

How to Process Books

1. Add the book to the catalog.
   1. In Readerware, choose “Auto-Catalog.” Make sure that Library of Congress and Amazon are selected, then use the barcode reader to scan the ISBNs of the books in one by one, and hit “next.”
      1. If there is no barcode, or if the program gives you an error, you can try manually entering the ISBN and hitting enter. If there is no ISBN (this only happens in very old books—honestly, we should not be acquiring books this old except in very special cases), put the book to the side.
   2. The program will generate a list of books based on your ISBNs. Double-check the list to make sure it got everything right.
      1. Sometimes the program will mismatch an ISBN, and you’ll end up with a weird item you don’t actually have. Delete these records.
   3. For books without an ISBN, or books that Auto-Catalog couldn’t find: search for the books on Amazon. When you find the record, drag the icon next to the URL onto the “drag & drop” button in Readerware. The item will be created in Readerware.
      1. There’s a tutorial here: http://readerware.com/help/html/rwBrwsIntg.html
   4. Congrats! You have added your book to the catalog.
2. Optional: clean up the record
   1. If your book’s title or author are misspelled, or formatted weirdly, you can click the green arrow next to the record to enter editing mode. There, you can fix the record.
3. Generate a call number and location.
   1. There are two ways to do this:
      1. Slower: go into the record itself. Enter a location in the location field, change the ISBN field to Dewey, and enter a call number. Or:
      2. Faster: from the main screen, click the Editing Mode button, then modify the location and call number.
   2. How To Generate Locations and Call Numbers

Genre	Location	How to Generate Call Number	Example Call Number
Fiction	Library	FIC + first three letters of author’s last name	FIC ROW
Graphic novels	Library—Graphic Novels	GN + first three letters of series title	GN SAI
Short stories	Library—Short Stories	SS + first three letters of author/editor’s last name	SS BOR
Poetry	Library–Poetry	POEM + first three letters of poet’s last name (editors for anthologies)	POEM GLU
Reference	Library–Reference	REF + Dewey call number	REF 423
Mature Readers	Mature Readers	M FIC + first three letters of author’s last name	M FIC PLA
Nonfiction	History Room	Dewey call number, + first two letters of author’s last name. (See “exceptions,” below.)	027.009 BA
Plays	History Room–Plays	PLAY + first three letters of playwright/editor’s last name.	PLAY BEC
Oversize nonfiction	Oversize—History Room	O + Dewey call number + first two letters of author’s last name. (Same rules as nonfiction.)	O 613.25 BU

1. Weird exceptions:
   1. Nonfiction: Readerware sometimes generates Dewey call numbers for you, but often will not. In this case, look up the book in the Austin Public Library catalog and use their call number. If APL does not have that particular book, search for a book on the same topic and use its call number. (It feels like cheating, but I promise, this is how Dewey works. J)
   2. If anthologies of short stories, poetry or plays belong to a series (e.g., The Best American Short Stories annual series), use the first three or four letters of the series name (e.g., SS BEST).
2. Generate a spine label
   1. Take the list of books you just processed and export them to a spreadsheet.
      1. Go to File, Export Database, select “selected books,” and export the following fields: Title, Author, Location and Dewey Call number.
      2. Click “next” until it generates a spreadsheet.
   2. Open your spreadsheet, select all of the Dewey call numbers, and drop them into the spine label template.
   3. Formatting the spine label:
      1. Select all, and set the font to Arial, size 11, bold.
      2. Set left margin to ½ inch (it should be here automatically).

• Align call numbers to the left-center. (Left on the x-axis, and centered on the up-and-down, or y-axis. This option is under “table tools” in Word.)

1. Finally, format the call number so that each piece of information rests on its own line, breaking Dewey numbers at the decimal. It will look like:

O
613
.25
BU

(If you’re confused, grab a book from the same section of the library and copy its label’s formatting.)

5. Shelve it!
   1. Print your labels and affix them to their books. I like to do mine 1/4″ from the base of the spine. Cover with a clear label protector (or colored, if you’re doing genre- or some other kind of fancy labeling) (known in the industry as FANCYPANTS labeling)
   2. Shelve your books in their section in alphanumeric order!
      1. For letter-based call numbers (fiction/plays/poems etc), just go in alphabetical order by call number: FIC BOO before FIC BYA.
         1. When several authors have the same last name, alphabetize them by first name as well. (Laurie Halse Anderson’s books will come before M.T. Anderson’s books, even though their call numbers are both FIC AND.)
      2. For number-based call numbers, go in numerical order.
         1. A trick! After the decimal, go in order by digit. This means that .300 is less than .45. Yes, this is perplexing (we had to do a quiz on this to shelve books at my undergraduate library–a test that, purportedly, no one got a 100% on). Just go digit by digit. Is 3 less than 4? Yes. Then place it first.

…told you.

Documentation like this is actually hugely helpful to write up. Not only does it firm up the process in your mind, but it helps all volunteers, assistants and predecessors process materials—potentially leaving you free to come up with displays and programming. (Known in the industry as “the fun part.”)**

**Just kidding, catalogers. I love and appreciate all that you do. Please, please keep doing it.

What do you listen to while you do technical processing? Share below? (I like Radiolab.)

Weeding: the good, the bad, and the MUSTIE

Way back in the very beginning of Operation Skybrary, I rolled up my sleeves and stared down the four heaping shelves in the English classroom. They contained about five hundred books between them, a vague mélange of fiction and nonfiction that the school had haphazardly accumulated over the years. The library was filled with real literary gems. But it was also filled with books that seemed to have appeared purely by accident, as though a book god once sneezed and inadvertently populated our shelves with musty 1980s problem novels and comic books in Japanese.

Also, people’s heads were always in the way.

The collection was little used by the student body—partly, everything was so crammed in and disorganized that the individual identities of the books were rendered invisible. Additionally, the presence of so many out-of-date or developmentally inappropriate texts were devaluing our users’ view of our entire collection. These problems were only exacerbated as donations began coming in. It was time for a weeding.

Which of these books is younger than our students? (Trick question.)

Weeding is the way libraries keep their collections relevant, current, and usable. For those tiptoeing into the profession for the first time, especially those entering librarianship out of a reverent love of books, the prospect of getting rid of books may induce chest-clutching and hang-wringing. I’m sorry, my darlings. Ready your spoonsful of sugar so that you may swallow this medicine: INDIVIDUAL BOOKS ARE NOT PRECIOUS. A healthy, relevant, usable collection (and, by extension, a happy, engaged, informed community) is.

In weeding my would-be collection, I used the popular MUSTIE criteria:

M=     Misleading: factually inaccurate
U=      Ugly: worn beyond mending or rebinding
S=       Superseded by a new edition of by a much better book on the subject
T=       Trivial: of no discernible literary or scientific merit
I=        Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the library’s community
(E=       Elsewhere: the material is easily obtainable from another library)*

(from http://lili.org/forlibs/ce/able/course4/05criteria.htm)

*E is in parentheses here because the Skybrary is not part of a school or public library system, and therefore items are not easily obtainable by this library from another library. (But without it, the word is MUSTI, which seems like the name of a high school sitcom character in the 90s.)

Musti like, totally loves old book smell? (image credit: ixdaily.com)

There’s a lot in this little acronym, all of it useful. Old and beaten paperbacks of easily obtainable classics were pulled from the collection. So, too, were business books written before the advent of e-mail, an operator’s manual for a riding mower, and a travel book about beautiful Czechoslovakia.

The most difficult letter to navigate is, at least in my mind, the I: “Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the community.” This may include books that are not academically or developmentally appropriate for your students. It may also include books that your students are capable of reading, but just plain aren’t interested in. Breastfeeding guides, witty comedies about the misadventures of dating in one’s 40s, or books on middle management may fall into this category, for example—or not. Get to know your community, and have a sense of what’s of interest to this age group.

Remember, a great librarian engages in what is commonly referred to as the CREW method: Continuous Review, Evaluation and Weeding. Your library is a living, breathing entity. Checking in on it regularly, rather than once a year, will keep it healthy.

What’s the best thing you’ve weeded? Share below!

This is mine.

Donations: a double-edged sword

Let’s back up to a few entries ago when you wrote that outreach e-mail. If all went well, you’ve got donations pouring in right now. If all is going realistically, some of those aren’t actually a great fit for your collection. But help! These are donations! If you don’t accept them, won’t somebody be upset?

THEY DIDN’T KEEP MY COPY OF “BOSSYPANTS,” STEVE.
NOTHING CAN MAKE ME FEEL BETTER.
NOT EVEN THESE FISH.
(image credit: cutearoo.com)

Our donors have been radically generous, and the Skybrary’s collection has more than doubled as a result. I was invited to go through the weeded materials of a local high school library and cherrypick hundreds of barely read middlegrade books; heaps of librarians and library school alumni donated brand-new books from conferences (see ARCs tomorrow). Many were casual and realistic about their donations. “If these aren’t good for your school, you can just give them to Goodwill,” I heard more than once over boxes containing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and graduate-level information theory textbooks. But some donors were less clear, or simply left books without a face-to-face meeting.

The inevitable moment I realized I needed clear a donation policy came when I arrived at the school one day to find no fewer than five heaping boxes of books parked in the library. Hooray!, I thought. Only to realize that under those nice new copies of Harry Potter were stacks of old adult horror books nibbled by mice and speckled with mold.

Also a lawnmower manual and some outdated travel books.

None of the school staff had seen the donor come in, and nobody in the community would ‘fess up. The main ethical concern was what to do with the books that weren’t suitable for our use. What if the donor, or the donor’s kids, came into the library and saw that their donated books weren’t on the shelf? Would they be upset? Would they ask to have them back? It was clear that my laissez-faire donation policy wasn’t going to fly much longer. To safeguard against future ambiguity, I wrote the following donation policy:

The Skybrary thrives on book donations! Donated materials are subject to the same criteria as regularly selected materials. As such, donated items must: be of student interest, be age-appropriate, and be in good condition. Materials not chosen for inclusion under these criteria, or that are duplicates of books already held in the Skybrary, will be donated to Goodwill or another charitable organization, given to the art teacher to be used in projects, or placed in the “free” box.

Your collection development policy is going to be your best friend. You’ve put a lot of thought into what you want in your library—if someone has given you a book that doesn’t fit (or even runs counter to) that standard, you aren’t obligated to keep it. In fact, to serve your library’s mission, you shouldn’t keep it. To protect yourself from donor dismay, include in your collection development policy a clear section on donation standards and what to do with donations that don’t suit it.

Be aware that donations can come in all forms! One family asked to donate $500 worth of new books to the Skybrary—I just had to tell them what to purchase.  Always have a running wishlist, and be cognizant of what you do want as much as what you don’t. With a policy in place, donations can become a fruitful, useful component of your collection.

(This entry feels boring, so here is a joke. Q: What was Old MacDonald’s nickname in the Army? A: G-I-G-I-Joe!) (This is the only joke I can consistently remember. I learned it from Highlights magazine when I was seven.) (Now if I meet you at a dinner party, you will already know my joke; CURSES; WHAT WAS I THINKING?)

Sex in the library (books)! How our students helped me develop a plan to handle mature content in their Skybrary

Now that you’re tapped into the librarian hivemind and know all of the great and ground-breaking titles, it’s time to buckle down and really consider your audience. This was a unique challenge for me at Skybridge: our school serves students from grades 6-12. This runs the gamut from smart but very (emotionally) young ten-year-olds to 18-year-olds with part-time jobs and coffee addictions. Obviously, books for one age group might not be of interest, or appropriate, for the other. This is what we call having a dual-audience library.

What do public libraries do? In a public library, all library content is available to all patrons.* It’s detailed in the American Library Association Bill of Rights—the librarian’s job is to allow everyone access to all information. A parent may tell his eight-year-old that he may not check out Sex Criminals. However, the librarian may not do so. It’s different in a school library. For one, the parent isn’t present, and many schools have privacy policies so that parents may not even know what their child has taken out. Also, because the library collection has been selected especially for youth (as opposed to a public library, which caters to all ages), there’s an expectation that the materials in the library already are youth-appropriate. In making that collection development policy, the librarian is putting her implicit seal of approval on each book. There’s no expectation that she’s read every book, but her collection development should be so intentional that she could stand behind every single book in a challenge (and she certainly wouldn’t put Sex Criminals in her collection).

How can you properly serve users at all stages along this development spectrum? There are a few options:

1. Shelve all materials for all ages together, and trust students to choose material appropriate for them developmentally.
2. Shelve all materials together, but label “mature” content (i.e., content that you’ve identified as not appropriate in your collection development policy) with stickers or other signifiers and only allow older students to borrow these materials.
3. Keep “mature” content in a secured closet or other locked area that older users may access with teacher permission.
4. Do not keep mature content in the library at all; students may access such material at home or from a public library.

Frankly, none of them sound great. The first two put an awful lot of trust in eleven-year-olds to not hang out in the library at lunch and giggle over naughty bits; the third stigmatizes material that may be developmentally important for high schoolers (like “first time” sex narratives, or stories in which characters fight to recover from sexual abuse) in the manner of the XXX back room of a video store. And that fourth one—the so-called safe route? It cripples your collection by making it irrelevant to teens who may not be able to get that information elsewhere, thus gutting your own mission statement.

Not the vibe we’re going for. (image credit: yelp.com)

To solve this dilemma, my director and I set aside documentation and philosophy and took a more radical, direct approach: we talked directly to the students.

Enter Oleanna, Rose and Tav,* three of our high school girls and most vocal readers (and, as a result of this discussion, the newly minted Student Library Council). *Names changed to PROTECT THE CHILDREN.

After about an hour, the council ultimately decided this:

• The Skybrary will contain material suited for teens only, which can be borrowed only by high school students, as well as middle school students whose parents have given written permission.
  • This allows developmentally-appropriate students to have access, and protects this material from being challenged by the parents of younger students
• The material will be kept on a shelf in the office marked “Mature Readers.”
  • The school’s office is a walk-through room directly outside of the library, and is almost always overseen by the codirectors or an administrator. This allows the administration to enforce the high-school only rule.
  • Additionally, because this is a high-traffic space, it is more difficult for kids to clump up and giggle over material, thus decreasing the self-consciousness of those who may want to borrow it.

Beautiful, Orpheus-inspired book for high schoolers; too much sex and teen drinking to endorse it for middle schoolers.

The council also suggested that some books with sexual content can remain in the main collection if sex is discussed abstractly, or if the writer employs the “fade to black” narrative lapse during the actual sex scene (such as in Twilight or Divergent, where the sex act occurs in the timeline of the book but is not described for the reader). Books that discuss sex explicitly would only be appropriate for the mature readers section. Books that take a casual, more adult attitude toward sex (as opposed to treating sex with the great importance that many “first time” narratives do) are questionably appropriate for the library and will be handled on a case-by-case basis. (Fifty Shades of Grey and Lolita? Right out.)

Both the director and I came away exceedingly impressed with the intelligence, eloquence and depth of consideration of these young women. Sometimes, when puzzling over how to best serve your audience, it’s powerful and formative to break out of your own brain-box and talk to that audience.  Remember, they’re just as invested in your final product, if not more! And valued, invested users will become your greatest advocates, and do more to build a community than you and your books could ever do alone.

How have your students changed your library for the better? Share below!

Awash in a sea of books? You need a collection development policy!

All right. Now you’ve got donated books flooding in like that little Dutch boy got tired of holding his finger in the dam, and your head is starting to spin. You bought all the stuff you need. You have books and a mission statement. So why doesn’t it feel like a library?

(image credit: tjinternational.ltd.uk)

Because, as you now know, a library is more than a bunch of books on a shelf. It’s an intentional and curated information collection that has a specific audience and a purpose. This all sounds great on paper*, but all of a sudden, you’re running into problems and questions. What do you do when somebody donates a book that’s out of date or in bad condition? If your collection is for elementary schoolers, do you buy Make Love Like a Porn Star? If you have a commitment to diversity, what does diversity mean—will you equally represent the perspectives of disenfranchised minorities and the KKK?

*HA HA, BECAUSE BOOKS ARE MADE OF PAPER? (I’m so funny.)

What you need is a document that translates your philosophy and mission into concrete actions that you’ll take in selecting your books. This is called a COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICY.

Developing a collection development policy was, for me, like trying to pull a magician’s scarf from a hat. Every time I thought I was done, I realized that there still one more thing that needed straightening out. So don’t be alarmed if yours expands! This is a guiding document that will form the backbone of your collection; it’s great to be as detailed as possible. But let’s start with the basics.

IN MAKING A COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICY, CONSIDER:

1. Your selection philosophy: what kinds of books you will select and why
2. Sources you will use to guide your selection
3. Your library’s purpose and methods in selecting controversial material, and what you will do if that material is challenged (i.e., if someone attempts to ban or remove the book)
4. How you will handle donations (including: your requirements for quality of donations, and what you will do with donated materials that do not meet these requirements)
5. Your weeding policy: which materials you will get rid of, why, and how often

A good collection development policy does a couple of things: it guarantees that your collection adheres to your library’s mission statement, it protects you in case of a book challenge (libraryspeak for “someone asks to remove or ban a book in your library”), and helps you keep your library current, relevant, and user-centered.

There are lots of great collection development policies available online. The one I developed for the Skybrary is as follows. I’ll be frank: this is my baby, but it’s not the most scintillating read. If you’re working on your own coll dev policy or other project, though, I hope it’ll be a great resource. Read on!

I. Selection philosophy (or: how we determine what goes in the Skybrary):

The mission of the Skybrary is to promote education, information literacy, and reading culture. To that end, material in the collection should do at least one of the following:

1. Support curriculum. Each semester, the Skybrarian will meet with the teachers and look through the offered courses, and strive to provide materials that will support and enrich course offerings. (For example: biographies of Amelia Earhart and Joan of Arc in conjunction with a women’s history class.)
2. Support information use: maintain a current collection of reference materials, both in print and digitally.
3. Support student interest. Education does not stop outside of the classroom! Through Google surveys and conversations with students, the Skybrarian should keep a running list of topics that Skybridge students are passionate about, and strive to provide books that support those passions. (For example: books on street art, edible plants, the Yakuza, etc.)
4. Support passion for reading by including fun, engaging, and/or entertaining material that students want to read. The job of the Skybrarian is not to “improve” students by pushing the classics on them. If students learn to love reading, they will discover worlds all on their own. This includes letting them read what theyare interested in—if this is a Minecraft novelization or a Monster High book, more power to ‘em! The Skybrarian will determine student interest through ongoing conversations with students, a book request clipboard kept in the library, and a Google survey conducted no less than once per year.

II. Criteria for selection:

All books in the Skybrary should:

• Be appropriate for the age, emotional development, ability level, learning styles, and social development of students.
• Be of student interest.
• Be in good physical condition.
• Be current and factually accurate.
• Not promote the oppression of, disenfranchisement of, or prejudice against others.

Breaking down the criteria:

• Appropriate for ability level and learning styles
  • The Skybrary should offer books in a wide range of reading levels and formats to accommodate student need. As the budget is very small, digital and audio versions of books can only be made available on an as-needed basis, but should be made available for interested students.
• Of student interest
  • Consider: is this book of interest to students ages 10-16? Just because a student can read a text doesn’t necessarily mean that it is relevant to their personal or academic interests. Equipment operating manuals, wry comedies about dating in one’s 40s, and old college accounting textbooks are a few examples. However, our students do have a wide variety of interests! Use your best judgment.
• Be current and factually accurate
  • Outdated travel guides, business books from before the age of e-mail, anthropological texts written before the civil rights era, and similarly obsolete texts are not only unhelpful to students, but potentially harmful. In order to build information literacy, the Skybrary collection must be a trustworthy and reliable source of correct and accurate information.
• In good condition
  • Books should be free of mold and insects, have intact covers and pages, and be free (or mostly free) of highlighting and writing. If the Skybrary receives a newer replacement copy of an old volume, that volume will be removed from the collection.

Diversity and books on controversial subjects:

In order to assist our student population in becoming global citizens by exposing them to a wide range of ideas, and in order to serve the needs of our entire student body, the Skybrary is proud to offer books that engage with diverse and controversial subject matter. To quote another great school library: “Selection of these materials will be based on the objectivity of the information they contain and the necessity of maintaining a diverse collection that represents various viewpoints, thus encouraging users to engage in critical analysis and to make judgments based on intellectual evaluation.

For more information on library selection policies in general, please see the following documents from the American Library Association:

―Evaluating Library Collections: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights‖ at: http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/statementspols/statementsif/interpretations/evalua tinglibrary.cfm

―Diversity in Collection Development: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights‖ at: http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/statementspols/statementsif/interpretations/diversi tycollection.cfm”

–from the excellent Pineview High School Library Collection Development Policy: http://www.pineview.org/uploads/3/8/6/3/3863562/pvhs_library_collection_policy_updated_oct-2010.pdf

III. Resources for selection:

In addition to conversations with students and teachers, Google surveys to gauge student interest, and the book request clipboard, the Skybrarian may use the following publications and bibliographies to guide material selection:

Review publications:

•             Booklist
•             Horn Book
•             School Library Journal
•             Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA)

Lists and Awards:

•             ALA Top Ten
•             YALSA Best of the Year/Best of the Best
•             Printz Award
•             Lonestar List
•             TAYSHA List
•             VOYA Top 10
•             Margaret A. Edwards Award
•             Coretta Scott King Award
•             Pura Belpre Award
•             National Book Award

Other resources:

•             The YALSA list-serve
•             Goodreads
•             Teen Librarian Toolbox (http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/)

IV. Donations:

The Skybrary thrives on book donations! Donated materials are subject to the same criteria as regularly selected materials. As such, donated items must: be of student interest, be age-appropriate, and be in good condition. Materials not chosen for inclusion under these criteria, or that are duplicates of books already held in the Skybrary, will be donated to Goodwill or another charitable organization, given to the art teacher to be used in projects, or placed in the “free” box.

V. Weeding (or, removing books from the Skybrary):

In order to keep our collection current, relevant, and powerfully serving our mission, the Skybrarian will “weed” the collection, which is the process of removing books from the collection.

Ideally, the Skybrarian will follow the CREW method of collection development: “Continuous Review, Evaluation and Weeding.” This means that the Skybrarian is constantly engaging with her collection and keeping it current and relevant. If there is no acting Skybrarian, the administration or volunteers should weed no less than once per school year.

In weeding, the Skybrarian or administration determines what to deselect using the MUSTI(E ) criteria:

M=     Misleading: factually inaccurate
U=      Ugly: worn beyond mending or rebinding
S=       Superseded by a new edition of by a much better book on the subject
T=       Trivial: of no discernible literary or scientific merit
I=        Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the library’s community
(E=       Elsewhere: the material is easily obtainable from another library)*

(from http://lili.org/forlibs/ce/able/course4/05criteria.htm)

*E is in parentheses here because the Skybrary is not part of a school or public library system, and therefore items are not easily obtainable by this library from another library.

Weeded books will be donated to Goodwill or another charitable organization, given to the art teacher to be used in projects, or placed in the “free” box.

VI. Mature Readers:

The Skybrary is dedicated to supporting readers along the full spectrum of its community’s age range: grades 6-12. Some materials developmentally appropriate and/or necessary for older teens, however, may contain themes inappropriate for our youngest demographic. These books include texts that thoughtfully explore: “first time” sexual encounters, drug and alcohol use, relationship violence and/or sexual abuse, depression, and other topics that our older teen readers may be curious about and need a safe method of exploring vicariously through reading, and/or may be experiencing for the first times themselves and need the advice, solace, positive modeling and solidarity found in literature about people experiencing the same thing.

Therefore, rather than exclude the materials from the library altogether, these high-school-appropriate materials are given a call number beginning with “M” and placed on the MATURE READERS shelf in the office.

What designates a book “Mature”?

Consider the audience. If the material presented in the text, and the manner in which it is presented, both gives you pause and has no educational, social or psychological value for middle school students, place it on the Mature shelf.

Topics that may flag a book as “Mature” include:

• explicit depictions of sex or heated sexual activity (The Difference Between You and Me; In the Shadow of Blackbirds)
• a casual attitude toward sexual activity (A Song for Ella Grey)
• drug use by protagonists (Looking for Alaska)
• adult depictions of depression and suicidal tendencies (The Belljar)
• sexual violence or other extreme violence (Speak)

If the Skybrarian is unfamiliar with a book, the website  https://www.commonsensemedia.org offers age-appropriateness ratings by parents, teachers and librarians. It is a good, though not infallible, resource. Amazon.com also lists the intended readers’ age for youth and children’s books (as determined by the publisher). Any books rated age 14 or older may be assigned to the Mature Readers section unless the Skybrarian decides otherwise.

Are all books containing this content appropriate for the “Mature” shelf?

No. Though high schoolers are relatively more developmentally advanced than junior high students, there’s still a wealth of reading material pitched explicitly toward adult sexual, psychological, and life experience. This material does not belong in a youth collection, even if the students are academically able to read the text.

The best example of this is 50 Shades of Grey, which multiple jokester students nominated in the “What do you want to see in the Skybridge Library?” survey in spring 2015. A respectful first-time sexual experience narrative is developmentally appropriate for this age group. A trilogy focused on the darker, nuanced elements of kink and sexual politics is not emotionally or developmentally appropriate. Use your best judgment.

Some guiding questions to determine if a book is “Mature,” or just too adult for the collection:

• Does this book contain educational, social or psychological value for high school students?
• Who is the publisher? Did this book come out from a teen imprint, or an adult imprint?
• The Skybrary contains plenty of books from adult imprints (for example, Of Mice and Men), but checking the imprint can serve as an indicator of intended audience when evaluating a book with darker or more adult themes.
• What do other youth educators and librarians think? Check Goodreads or ask around on the YALSA list-serve if you’re uncertain.

Who can borrow a “Mature” book?

Mature Readers material circulates normally to all high schoolers, as well as to middle schoolers whose parents give written permission. For middle schoolers, permission may be given on a general, rather than per-book, basis.

Some Skybridge students take a mix of high school and middle school classes. For these students, use of the Mature Readers section may be determined by the student’s Composition class level, or at the administrator’s discretion.

Mature Readers material is subject to the same circulation and renewal policies as non-Mature books.

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Questions? Comments? What’s in your collection development policy? Share below!