Practical Experienced!!

So I have had no holiday but I am now two thirds of the way through my last ever subject for this course!
I am so excited.

The prac report has been sent but I thought I might share my perosnal reflection here...

Being placed in a public library could not have provided a more alien experience to my own work as a teacher-librarian. While many of the processes and core work are the same, the scale cannot be compared. Undertaking my placement at the end of my teacher-librarian studies has had both its positive and negative aspects. On the down side I have already been working as a teacher-librarian for over a year and have come into my own habits and understanding of what it is to be a librarian. So I was quite apprehensive about undertaking the placement. What I have come to realise is the value of the placement experience lies in its ability to offer a teacher-librarian in training the opportunity to partake in new and different experiences. Personally, it also meant working with fully qualified and often very experienced librarians who were able to share their depth of library knowledge with me. This reminded me that I am not alone in the library world. Working in a school library can be an isolating experience as the teacher-librarian is often the only librarian. And while many of the librarians I met on placement did have specific roles within the library linked to cataloguing or collection management what was satisfying to see is that all librarians are linked by the core role of providing access to information for their patrons.

The value of the placement experience also lies in its ability to allow one to put theoretical knowledge into practice. Until now organisational theory had been just that – theory. In a school the library is not really an organisation in itself, but rather one component of the larger school organisation. Thus as a teacher-librarian, while I manage some staff and make some decisions, the strategic plans and goals stem from the school organisation rather than the library. This is completely different I feel to how most libraries, and how Penrith library in particular, see themselves. The placement experience has allowed me to see that a similar relationship exists between a public library and its governing body, the council. However, a public library seems to act more autonomously and this is something I think has value, and would add value to my own library. It highlights the idea of the librarian as leader – another concept which until now I had only seen in theory. While I had understood that the teacher-librarian should be a leader, until the placement experience I had not seen how this was possible. The placement experience has reinforced one aspect of the role of the teacher-librarian and that is that all librarians, including teacher-librarians, need to be advocates for their libraries and their users.

I think the greatest value of this placement experience for me is that it has also led me to consider what I believe the core role of a teacher-librarian to be. It has made me realise that I want to be, a teacher-librarian, not just a librarian.

Imagine me sobbing...

I have just had a look at some other Professional Portfolios and I think I am going to be sick.

For example  http://abarbakoff.wordpress.com/


Am I supposed to create mine as if I am actually going to use it, or do I follow the assessment criteria, in which case it is not really a professional portfolio??

A work in progress...

I feel like everything I am writing at the moment, that perhaps even my life, should have an ellipsis after it...

In two days I begin my prac at Penrith library. I am excited to be introduced to a new kind of library environment, but at the same time I am feeling stressed about it because it means that I am not really getting a holiday. And after the term I have had I feel like I need one...

I am also working on the Professional Portfolio. I have managed to procrastinate a lot, fiddling over how it looks and how it is layed out. I have no idea what I am actually going to include, the readings I need or the supporting documents that should be attached...

I feel very argh...

...

Professional Portfolio – Take Two

So after writing that post and getting all my ideas together, I sent off an email to the supervising lecturer as per the subject outline.

And in my attempts to appear clever, and alliterate, I did not get my ideas across as clearly perhaps as they should have been.

As a result there has been some tweaking. 

Therefore I no longer alliterate (though give me time, I might be able to find another word for it before the portfolio has to be submitted), but I do now seem to have a clearer focus.

I will be exploring ‘What is the role of the TL?’ a question that I think encompasses all that I have studied over the past year and a half. Within the broad, and perhaps unanswerable, sphere of that question I will be looking at Literature, Collaboration and Information Literacy.

Wish me luck…

The Final Frontier – otherwise known as the Professional Portfolio

With the new semester about to begin, and the end of this degree fast approaching, I thought it might be about time I got started on the major assignment.

In a fortnight I will be beginning my prac and I need to have it done before I go on holidays to Europe, so I have decided to shore up my ideas and get them off to Roy in order to be able to begin.

I thought it would be easy to choose the topics about which to write. But because I want to be clever this is proving a little more troublesome than expected. 

Here are my musings…

My head hurts but at least I think I know what I am doing.

Day Three Study Visit Canberra

Today I am tired and am looking forward to going home. That being said, today was also the best day we have had so far in my opinion.

My elective today was the University of Canberra library and the Lu Rees Australian Children's literature library housed there.

The Lu Rees library is like the best book shop you will never be able to buy anything from, and if I could work anywhere or set up my own library it would be exactly like Lu Rees. And the most amazing thing is that they do it on no budget at all. I am in awe!!!!!

The other great thing about this morning's session was learning about how UC deliver their information literacy program. As a TL in a high school I feel like my role is to prepare students for higher education and in many ways I would like to model my library on university rather than school ones.

Some things I saw that I would like to implement are librarians being 'on call' for faculties and having a research assistance desk.

We also went to the War Memorial today - who knew they had a library?! Heard some beautiful stories about donations of private records. If I worked there I think I would be crying every day.

Last day tomorrow, yay!

Day Two Study Visit Canberra

What have I learned?

Today gave me some time to reflect, mostly because we got a decent break and I wasn't so tired from walking up and down endless stacks.

So what do I think so far? Well here are a couple of thoughts...

There are many ways to get into 'library'. You don't need to know how to catalogue or index or check out books. You can just have a special interest in a subject or be good at mixing and using glue.

Some things are 'born digital'. How on earth do you store these things forever? Also does that mean any document made in word is born digital?

In Canberra libraries seem to only take the form of giant storage containers. Collecting for collections sake rather than to support the needs of users or for collections to ever be seen and used. What is the point of this? I feel like an aberration as I am happy to throw things away - shock horror!

And finally I can never be anything but a teacher-librarian because I hate cataloging. And that is all that other librarians do it seems.

Day One Study Visit Canberra

Well he day is over - finally. It was really long and busy and I'm not sure yet if it was interesting.

Like I said before (I think, at least I know I've thought it) one of the problems with this visit and with this unit in general is that it is across a number of library degrees which means it cannot be relevant to everyone all the time.

We spent six hours at the National Library. Six hours! I know there are five floors and over two hundred kilometres of books, but there are also few chairs and many many stairs. I did enjoy seeing what they had and getting the behind the scenes tour, but six hours?!

Then there was a school visit, which I would have enjoyed more had we not got there at three thirty and gone over by half an hour. Their space was interesting and well used. I liked many of the ideas the TL presented but I am now so so tired.

Tomorrow Parliament House, a two hour break and film archives, oh my!

Canberra Study Visit 2012

Well here I am in Canberra.

Tomorrow I begin a four day tour of canberra's libraries and archives. I would have preferred to go on the Sydney visit but I cannot afford it as it is not in the holidays plus my wedding is the Sunday after.

Am I excited? I am not really sure. I'm a bit stressed and a bit worried. I think once I get started I might feel better. I do see the point of visiting other libraries but as part of a masters of teacher-librarianship I think school libraries would be better. I feel the same about the upcoming work experience, that should be in an education setting too.

Will update tomorrow... Maybe things will be good.

Only ever always by Penni Russon

I feel pretty jipped by this book. All the reviews I have read, and even the blurb on the back, suggested that this was going to be an interesting dystopic parallel universe kind of text.

I can tell you it was not. 

It was much more juvenile than I thought it was going to be. I wasn’t moved or inspired. Really I was just disappointed.

There was so much potential. Two girls, both dealing with loss, somehow connect between two similar but very different worlds.

Like I said – endless potential.

But nothing really happens.

My only respite is that it was a short book and did not take me very long to read.

Again, it's been a while....

Maybe I am just not cut out for this web 2.0 stuff.
As you may have noticed I have not been on my blog for a while. What I wonder though is if this is a good or a bad thing?

In saying this, however, I have just started a twitter account, so maybe it is not web 2.0 that I have trouble with, perhaps it is just blogging. I was never really any good at keeping a diary so I guess my habits haven't changed even though the medium has.

I am excited that the semester draws to a close as next year will be my final year.
Completing three subjects at once was a challenge but overall I am happy with how things have gone.
Already I have submitted my forms for when I would like to do my study visit and placement and enrolled for next year.

So now I can enjoy the upcoming Christmas holidays and wait until I become a fully fledged teacher-librarian.

ETL402 – Module 3

Literature and the collection

Some interesting points were raised as part of this module and there are some things in here that I wish I had read before I did assignment one, but never mind, I know better now. There are four things I want to cover; promoting reading, fiction arrangement, censorship and e-books.

Promoting reading

            La Marca (2000) and Cremin (2010) have some very interesting things to say about promoting reading. At the school in which I work reading is the domain of the English faculty. And students are often surprised when I am able to talk to them about the novels they are reading. I take every opportunity I can to talk about books and find the best time is to catch the students as they are borrowing.

            To promote the idea of reading for pleasure the school has a programme called START – students and teachers all reading together. For twenty minutes each morning students and teachers must read a novel. The problem with this is that many students do not like to read and so come into the library of a morning and pick any old book to read. Another problem is the fact that it is silent reading and teachers and students are not really given any time to engage socially to discuss their novels.

            The school also has a student book club but it seems sporadic at best. Personally I would like to hold readings at lunch once a week but I don’t know if students would even turn up.

Fiction arrangement

            As I am currently rearranging non-fiction I don’t have all that much to add here. In the school library I work in fiction can be found in five places – the general fiction section, graphic novels, quick reads and classics. I also have weekly displays of selected fiction such as books turned into films. New books also have there own front on display. If I could I would have all the fiction face out – students are much more interested in a book when they can see its cover.

Censorship

I have written about this before but I guess that it is something that hangs over the heads of all teacher-librarians. I am of the opinion that you cannot please everyone, and that just because one person might not like a text it doesn’t mean it has no place in the library.

Because I am in a high-school, and because it is a catholic girls’ high-school I feel like I often walk a very fine line between what is appropriate and acceptable and what is not. If I ever buy a book that I consider a little controversial I stick a ‘senior fiction’ tag on it and shelve it in that section. I feel like that covers me a little if I am ever challenged. The problem is though that I do not police the section. If a junior chooses to borrow a senior fiction book I let them.

Censorship is hard because everyone has the right to read whatever they choose but in a school situation there are certain values one must uphold.

E-books

            I must admit I haven’t really worked out how to ‘do’ e-books in the school library. Our technology is not that crash hot and so sometimes I think they will be wasted. However, more and more teachers and students have ipads and iphones and e-book readers and I should be moving with the times. In the interim, until I can figure them out, I have subscribed to World Book Online Advanced which has its own e-book library for students to download. They are mostly old classics and the such but it seems like a good place to start.

ETL505 – Topic Four

Metadata Standards

                    

I must admit that I still do not fully understand cataloguing rules and ways to write bibliographic descriptions. I find it hard to follow both the terminology and punctuation. (This is probably going to make the second assignment rather difficult).

What I do understand, however, is the why. Why it is so important to have descriptions, why it is so important to have standards and why there is a shift from AACR2 to RDA.

I think Kirkland’s (2010) article sums up well the implications of and reasons these changes are occurring. As with all education things these days, bibliographic description needs to become more user-centred and user-friendly. She makes the point that a shift to an online format, with generic descriptions for all types of resources will make for more relevant library OPACs.

Chapman’s (2010) article further highlights the need for change. It seems silly to me to restrict descriptions of format because it doesn’t fit, or to not even have links between the same text because format is different. Again the generic-ness of RDA descriptions that take format into account in different ways seems so much better.

I guess what I am discovering is that AACR2 seems to be cataloguer and budget friendly, while RDA is much more user/student/searcher friendly. And if the whole point of the library and the Teacher-Librarian is to meet the needs of users/students I say bring it on.

ETL402 – Module Two

Diversity in Children’s Literature

I really enjoyed reading about all the different, established and emerging genres in children’s literature. But already working in a library I feel I know a lot about this already.

It takes me back to something from the first module, that is that we were all children once and therefore have our own ideas about what it is or should be like. In light of this and with what I said last module I still read young adult fiction and still feel like a young adult, even if I am twenty-four.

I guess the really good thing about this module is that it has helped me to understand the first assignment a little better. It was hard to think about how children’s literature cold be used to promote anything other than literacy.

Now I feel better equipped to start my literature search for that assessment.

Just a side note that I feel I must add – with all this reading about children’s literature to do I have barely any time to actually read children’s literature!!

ETL505 – Topic Three

Introducing Metadata

I really like metadata. I totally get its purpose and usefulness and am slowly starting to see what the point of this subject is. I can also see how this fits in with the first assignment and so I say hooray for metadata.

It is obvious from the Milstead and Feldman (1999) reading that while metadata is an awesome thing it is highly problematic when there is no regulation of “how to write down the descriptive information and what to write down” (p.26).

For me one of the biggest problems associated with searching is that you don’t always know what you are looking for. Metadata deals with this quite well, however, it does depend on the fields included in that data.

ETL402 – Module One

Children’s Literature

Well I have finally started the reading for this unit, and despite my protests and phobia of long readings it wasn’t as nearly as difficult as I thought.

So my ideas…

Up front this unit asks you to consider what is a child and childhood and therefore what is children’s literature? I think that in terms of a generally acknowledged definition and one that is easy to understand saying that a child is anyone zero to eighteen years old seems pretty satisfactory. I guess the problem with that is though that there are many different capabilities and levels within that broad range. An eighteen year old is not necessarily going to be thinking or acting like a five year old. This has ramifications when one tries to define children’s literature. One thing that really stood out for me is that everyone, and children specifically, should be “reading literature according to their physical and intellectual capacities” (Winch, 2006, p.399).

So what then is children’s literature? I think that it is anything written or created for ‘children’. It would deal with issues that engage and concern the 0-18 year-old’s. just like adult literature it is broken up into genres, but rather than just going by theme so to speak, it is also broken up according to those physical and intellectual capabilities. So not only do you have romance, but you also have tween, teen, pre-school etc. And even though it may be divided this ageist way, it doesn’t mean you cannot read outside your age group to suit your capabilities and needs.

This debate reminds me of some trouble I have been having with manga. Each series is given a rating but I find those rated ‘older teen’ are actually more suited to adults. It is interesting to see what is acceptable to the Japanese compared to what I think is acceptable for a high school full of Catholic girls in Australia.

I was also struck by an issue raised in two of the readings to do with an article by Zipes (2009). The question is raised of whether new technology is ‘dulling children’s senses’ and whether images are going to be more important than words. Zipes seems to think that this is a massive problem, but is it really? If children are becoming more digitised why shouldn’t the literature they read reflect and engage them through the media they like. Again it comes back to the manga/graphic novel thing. I cannot buy enough of these for the school library, students will read them over and over and even out of order because they like the style and format. This doesn’t mean I have stopped buying traditional novels, it has just led to more borrowing and reading – a good thing I think.