Thursday 26 July 2012

First rung - ETL401 Teacher librarianship

This post is a reply to a thread titled -
'We need to rock the boat!' -  Principal support and good communication

Library staff, all library staff, not only schools, are sometimes their own worst enemy, over the years I’ve noticed that we don’t push or even highlight what we can provide beyond the initial ‘library orientation' lesson, (a 15 minute walk and talk in nowhere near enough).
I don’t work in a school, but because of the nature of our funding and staff cuts, TAFE libraries have had to redefine themselves and highlight our relevance, not only to the students (which is hard enough), but also to prove the value of what are doing and what we can offer (if they let us) to the teaching staff and our managers and directors (we have more levels of management than schools do, unfortunately).
This year we have, because of our new library manager, been able to organize set times for library staff to work on a full information literacy program with each class, helps the students and provides a service the teachers don't have time to do in as much depth as is needed.

I believe that we must push ourselves into the spotlight, because it's not going to shine it on us unless we put our hand up, as Brophy states ‘libraries should demonstrate that they are providing viable services, based on improving and supporting teaching, learning and research, because the fact is that that much of what libraries actually achieve is intangible to management’ (Brophy, 2001 p. 9).

Brophy, P. (2001). The library in the twenty–first century: new services for the information age. London: Library Association publishing

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