Category Archives: library environment

The Governor

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Governor Macquarie's chair
Mister Macquarie’s Chair. 😉

This evening I braved the rain to attend a teachers’ preview of Sydney’s Governor Lachlan Macquarie celebrations. Although I couldn’t get into the CBD early enough to see whatever is on display at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, I did get to the quick tour of NSW Parliament House (many thanks Graham Spindler!) and the formal stuff at the State Library. A NSW DET representative demonstrated the Centre for Learning Innovation’s “Macquarie 2010” Notebook 10 materials for use with IWBs.

The displays look to be very stimulating and I liked how the State Library’s physical exhibit, “The Governor: Lachlan Macquarie 1810 to 1821″, is labelled with separate, colour-coded display cards for adults and school children. Well worth a visit, as are their online archives!

I had to smile on the way out: here’s the new motto of the State Library:

Check it out at State Library of NSW

Looks familiar?

"Check it out!" - Shoestring makeover

Has someone been drawing inspiration from my shoestring makeover project?

Dewey is dying?

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While I was away last week, there was a flurry of frantic and defensive posts on a teacher-librarian listserv in regards to an academic postulating the fading away of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. (As per the hyperlinked article.)

I understand that some Australian public libraries (City of Joondalup, WA, as one example) now organise their non fiction items in “genres” – presenting the collection more like a bookshop does – and that when they get new (pre-catalogued?) items in, they cover the Dewey spine label with a genre sticker and shelve the books in alphabetical order in genre areas.

Hmmm, I’m already having trouble conceiving of many “genres” for non fiction that don’t reconcile with Dewey. I mean, “Animal books” will still end up in the one place whether they have a Dewey number in the 500s or a coloured sticker on the spine that indicates “Animals”. (There have always been people who wished the “Domesticated Animal” books were nearer the other animal books, instead of near the “Agriculture and Farming” resources.) Whether the 500 section ends up in a far corner with a huge heading called “A for Animals”, or wedged between the 400s and the 600s on regular shelves, it’s not all that different to a school library creating a separate Fiction section (instead of all “Literature” over in the 800s), or a funky spinner stand for popular graphic novels. Accurate OPACs give users the location, and it hardly matters a damn, to most people, what the actual Dewey number is.

Covering the Dewey number with a sticker does sound a bit extreme, though, creating lots of work undoing the experiment if it fails. Why not show both, but shelve according to one?

Surely what the original proposer meant, when he predicted/promoted an end to Dewey was that libraries should always be open to incorporating new ways of responding to its users. Dewey may, one day, be surpassed by a different method of classifying human (and alien?) knowledge. If young people are thinking differently now, due to the multimedia ways in which they (and we) receive and create information every hour of the day (hello Facebook, MySpace, Yammer and Twitter!), then innovative strategies such as “covers out” shelving (like a modern book shop) instead of “spines out”, grouping books into genres instead of alphabetical or Dewey order, lounging areas and comfy beanbags for browsing, laptop terminals, intermixing fiction and non fiction (eg. putting novels about horses into the non fiction “Horses” section), automated self-borrowing systems, adding terminals for eBook downloads, specialty spinner racks, etc., are just some of the possibilities.

You’ll never force everyone into understanding or tolerating Dewey in libraries. Teachers make an interesting group to observe. Probably every teacher in NSW would have been exposed to Dewey in “library lessons” as a student (in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s), and yet I find that the only teachers who “understand” or appreciate the Dewey Decimal System are those who used to be library monitors during their own school days. For most information needs in a school or public library, an OPAC that gives users the exact, unique local location, whether that be a Dewey number of a shelf, a spinner rack near the front desk or a cardboard box in Archives, is all that is needed.

Librarians should always be open to testing out new ideas and seeing which innovations work for their users. I thought the stodgy “shushing” stereotype librarian was supposed to be long gone, but now we have people saying, “Don’t take away my Dewey!” and “Don’t dumb down my library!” – which is destined to become old-fashioned the moment innovative ideas are trampled upon before they are even tried.

Ha! Can you tell I haven’t shelved a book since early Term 1? Roll on my BER library!

Time 4 a bargain!

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With the concrete slab of the new school library less than a day old, I happened to be at Westfield Parramatta last Sunday, and noticed that a little store called Typo was having a huge sale on 20cm tall, painted, wooden letters for creating wonderful library signage! Seven letters or numerals, either in black or white, for only $20. The regular price per item is usually $4.95 – and to think of all those plain MDF letters I sanded, painted, lacquered and glued/nailed/Velcroed at the end of 2008…

Typo in Westfield Parramatta
You can see the wooden letters on the shelving along the far wall.

As I stood there, stunned by the potential savings, I couldn’t think of what I needed for my future library signage needs. I already have a concept for outside signage. I was also rather taken by the “@“, “#“, “$” and full stops available in the range but, apart from something like “INFO@YOUR LIBRARY“, I really was at a loss as to how to proceed. I wandered away in deep thought, worried I’d let a big opportunity pass me by and the stock would be exhausted when I got back a week later. During the looooong week, I did realise that I’d had to settle for a temporary (laminated) version of the following signage idea, my concept of which was positioned beside the four world clocks:

Time 4 learning & Core values - Shoestring makeover

I hurried back today, arriving at Typo at 10.25am, only to find they were closed. Oh no! Surely they wouldn’t be closed all day? With only seconds to spare before I was due to meet a friend at the cinemas, I was able to collect the black lettering I needed at 11.00am, and I even found a way to utilise an “@”! (Note that, unless they have more lettering out in a back storeroom, I did end up getting the last two examples of “E” and “N“.)

Time 4 learning
TIME 4 LE@RNING

That made thirteen pieces, with one more to go to make the $40. I chose a spare “@” in white – I’ll come up with a way to use it eventually:

1 x @

The original “Time 4 Learning” concept, as it appeared in the blog last year, is discussed in detail HERE!

My advice: Hurry to Typo!

An unexpected archeological dig

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My current school set up a little museum of archival material a few years ago, to coincide with the opening of our then-new school assembly hall. A piece about my research into epidiascopes was the focus of one of my very first blog entries (in 2006).

Since then, I’ve been on the lookout for a third-of-a-pint “school milk” glass bottle, without a lot of success. What used to be such a ubiquitous object in primary schools of the 1950s and 60s and essentially vanished off the face of the earth. Recently, I was given a few regular one-pint (600 ml) milk bottles and even a half-pint cream bottle, but numerous visits to antique stores proved fruitless. In 2007, the Royal Easter Show featured a special offer: plastic replicas of the “school milk” bottles (but marked 200 ml) – and I was beginning to think that was going to be as close as we could ever get. One of the teachers has a waxed paper drinking straw of the same bygone era as the milk bottles, which she has promised to donate if we can find a bottle, but yesterday we were doing the happy dance of an archeologist!

#98
Two glass 600 ml milk bottles (1970s) and an Imperial half pint cream bottle (1960s). For scale, they stand next to my plastic replica of a 1960s Dairy Farmers’ school milk 1/3 pint bottle (from the 2007 Sydney Royal Easter Show).

The workmen excavating the ground for our new library’s foundations found, on the site of the old library, two examples of actual 1/3 pint “school milk” bottles buried in the rubble. They are both embossed, in slightly different ways, with “1/3 PINT PASTEURISED MILK” in raised lettering.

The “Moment in time” episode (#37) of the ABC-TV series, “Can we help?”, and the online transcript, explains that the “School Milk Scheme” was originally the idea of the British Medical Association, which had promoted that children under thirteen years of age needed a daily ration of milk. It “would be beneficial for school children’s physical and mental development”, and by 1951 the Menzies’ government had all Australian primary school students being offered milk daily. It was supposedly promoting “bone growth and well being and general good health”, but more cynical types considered it was a program to remove a glut of milk from local sources. The scheme ended in 1973 under the direction of the Whitlam government, no doubt reacting to Nugget Coombes’ full report into government spending. Supposedly, “one of the things he discovered when he looked at the school milk scheme was that it wasn’t doing any good at all. It had a marginal or very slight effect on the health of children” and the scheme was scrapped – just as many schools took delivery of fridges, if I recall, that would have kept the milk icy cold (for a change!)

Ask any adult who was at school in the 50s and 60s and they’ll all have some wild and wacky anecdotes about school milk. Amongst my own is the solving of the mystery of the little black specks that began appearing in our classroom’s milk supply one term. New milk monitors had been appointed, and it was their job to remove all the silver foil caps from the bottles and insert the waxed paper straws, thus encouraging even the laziest student to partake of his average daily allowance of dairy! After several frustrating days of putting up with the enigmatic black speckles, we finally caught Jeffrey, the shorter of the two monitors, standing atop the crate of opened bottles in his plastic-sandalled feet, spruiking his wares to all and sundry. Yes, it was little chunks of fine asphalt gravel, trapped in the crevices of his footwear, which had been polluting our milk.

School milk
Our amazing archeological find!

Be brave! Go front-out!

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A colleague over on the OZTL_Net listserv asked about making her high school library look more like a bookshop, with more of the book covers facing outwards to entice readers. She specifically mentioned those old brown library shelves, with their stodgy, flat canopies, and her unsuccessful efforts to use them as display areas. Does putting an angled display shelf in its place mean overcrowding below?

Sure, I said, if that’s all you can manage to do, it’s better than nothing. But I also suggested combining her new arrangement with a savage cull of old books. Crowded spine-out shelves are very uninviting, and it’s the front-out books that will be moving, while the spine-out books will no doubt get ignored by most browsers. There’ll be less books, but the borrowing figures will surely rise!

Kevin Hennah, at the wonderful PD day I attended in 2007, heartily recommended ridding all libraries of their antiquated, flat-top canopy shelves. Wherever possible, he suggested shelving that encouraged front-on displays. There are some library furniture catalogues around that have beautiful box-shaped tubs, rather like the old-style LP record bins, for picture books and large format, fully-illustrated non fiction.

In libraries with very limited space, or limited budgets, he recommended slant boards (even homemade), that could cover plain, unused shelving bay ends and turn them into attractive display spaces for cover-out books. In my primary school library, I had to be even more frugal. I knew we couldn’t justify spending money on slantboards – but I found a range of Japanese plastic wares in a chain of stores (called Hot Dollar), such as hooked baskets and funky, colourful, little magnetic boxes. I also made much better use of two existing spinner racks – it’s impossible to keep them filled! Front-on displays make books *move*!

Even assemble-it-yourself wheeled plastic trolleys, also from a “two dollar bargains” store, filled little corners of the library with useful front-on display space. I swapped the slanted display shelving of several old portable magazine racks to convert a set of standard wall shelves into display shelves. Click here for more amazing results!

Can you tell I’m just itching for my new library to be built?

School librarians shelved by the ‘Net?

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I had some good belly laughs from Network Ten’s 7pm Project‘s presentation on teacher-librarians on Friday night. The pithy segment covered the forthcoming government inquiry into Australian school libraries and the roles of teacher-librarians. As always with this kind of TV news satire, when you’re close to the issue it can be hard to see the humour, ie. knowing that some teacher-librarians have felt under fire from a naive principal, or shortsighted Departmental or political decision-making, for many years.

I hope this inquiry into the state of teacher-librarianship has positive results for all stakeholders across Australia, especially the students. NSW conditions are certainly better than in many interstate school libraries; too often, when “equity” comes into a controversial issue, we all end up with less in order to be seen to be equitable. My school’s brand new “stimulus package” library starts being built this week – our local community really hopes I’m still there to work in it when it’s finished. What’s been interesting is that we’ve been without an actual physical collection (and a venue for centralized library visits) for two months now – and yet I’m still doing cooperative planning, programming and teaching, and promoting recreational reading, going from door-to-door. My influence on all class programs is as strong as ever. The TL role is so much more than a school’s information collection, be it shelves of books or a web of Internet sites.

As James Henri rightly says on the 7pm Project‘s web page, “Information is information. Packaging is just packaging”. With the Internet, everybody gets to be their own publisher and having “experts to manage what information is required by whom and when” has never been more important. Someone needs to be showing the students (and the teachers) how to navigate the virtual information overload. I’m not sure I want to evolve into one of those IT guys whom Carrie Bickmore loathes. Teacher-librarianship is so much more (although there’s plenty of IT blood running in our veins; has been for years!).

These principals who supposedly imagine a fully electronic, futuristic school library with no books – and no trained TLs to manage that info – are really going to be in trouble when there’s a power blackout. Or when their child or grandchild wants one last picture book to be shared before bed.

I did try to leave a comment on the 7pm Project‘s web page, but some IT guy’s message was telling me I was “undefined”.