Virtual interview

My geezerdom is sometimes confused for a standing in the library field and I am occasionally the subject of some poor library student's dreaded "interview a person in the field" assignment.

I've gotten a bit more fussy about these lately, mostly because writing about oneself tends to be pretty boring. But I will respond to interview questions provided the student has taken the time read my bio and to compose interesting questions.

Lindsay, a student at Indiana University, did both. Her questions, my replies:

1.    In your article entitled, “It’s Good to be Inflexible” you speak of a need to have some fixed scheduling built into the School Media Center, which is convergent from the recent trends in the field. I am interested to know how you define and develop this type of scheduling.
I am not so sure fixed scheduling is a “recent trend.” It has been considered best practice for some time by AASL and many library professionals. My argument is not against flexible scheduling, but an acknowledgement that fixed scheduled programs can also have positive aspects for students. Ideally, the staffing of a media center would allow a combination fix/flex – the ability for the media specialist to meet with all kids for story times, book check out, mini-lessons, etc, on a regular basis, but also have time to work with teachers and classes on integrated units. I would encourage people to read not just my article, but the responses and papers in the links associated with it.

2.    In the past decade local and national acts of violence and terrorism have impacted security and intellectual freedom in public places, including schools. How, if any has this affected your Media Center and policies?
Parents are more aware of a child’s need for safety. Parental concern is then relayed to the administration or school board members that then sometimes makes knee-jerk reactions about student access to Internet resources. Districts blocking all blogging sites, all e-mail sites, and over-blocking websites with filters are examples of this.

The second fallout of school violence is perhaps more interesting and more consequential to education in the long run. Parents are insisting their children have cell phones with them at all times, including in class. (Some districts are being sued over this.) With the growing functionality of cell phones, students are therefore pretty much guaranteed having an “information appliance” with them at all times. We have all been in meetings where more work was being done on laptops and PDAs than face-to-face. So just think of how compelling a F2F classroom will need to be to compete for students' attention with the online world accessed through cell/PDA/slate/e-book/laptop gizmos! The question remains if teachers will be able use these devices to help educate kids as opposed to just railing against them.

3.    How do you feel about using Pod casts as a teaching method? Is it worth the time and effort? Do you think it will help serve as a form of entertainment or lack interest for students?
Since reading, not listening, is my personal preference of learning style, I am a poor person to ask. On the one hand, any way that information can be presented to a student that is appealing is good; on the other hand, a post-literate generation who learns only auditorilly and visually, not through the printed word is very foreign to me. I am just not sure that a person who has heard The Grapes of Wrath is getting the same experience as someone who has read The Grapes of Wrath. (But I have to say, I prefer to get my history via books on tape during long car trips rather than reading it.)

Oh, if it is only teacher lectures that are being podcast, it’s pretty safe to rule out the entertainment factor.

4.    How can you reach teachers that teach in isolation and you have no common interests with?
I am not sure it is all that important that one tries. I’ve yet to see the media center staffing that allows a media specialist to work with every teacher. We have an expression when doing staff development in our department – ‘Work with the living.”  My experience is that any media specialist working collaboratively with 50-75% of her/his staff is doing a pretty darned good job.

5.    I was reading an article you wrote that suggested initiating collaboration with atypical subject and/or staff areas i.e. Physical Education. How could you collaborate with the Physical Education teacher to stop the spread of obesity? How can you integrate technology in this area without taking away from the physical activity that youth today so desperately need?
One collaborative activity that our media specialists do with the PE department is  heart monitoring unit. The PE teacher has the kids use the monitors to record their resting, walking, running etc. pulses and then the media specialist helps them plunk those numbers into a spreadsheet from which graphs are made, allowing the kids to see the differences.

6.    During my experience as a student teacher I had a situation where I was perceived as apathetic to a faculty member even though I highly respected him. Have you ever had any similar experience(s) and if so how did you overcome the initial reaction?
Hey, I am apathetic to a lot of people, I suppose. It might only be when apathy shows itself through in poor service that it becomes an issue. I find poor service is usually a result of poor communication resulting in a lack of understanding of needs.

7.    Do you feel it is worth it to fight to keep a controversial material in your collection or do you avoid controversy at all costs? Have you had any unusual experiences with censorship issues?
You are asking the original intellectual freedom fighter here. Absolutely one should have as wide a variety of voices and opinions expressed in one’s collection as possible. So long as material is age appropriate, well-reviewed and meets a curricular or personal interest need, it should be in the collection.

Having said that, I would not fight to have any particular resource retained per se, but to make sure that due process is followed whatever material is challenged.

I don’t know how unusual it is, but we apply the same philosophy for websites that we do print materials – unless it is specifically prohibited by CIPA (basically porn), we allow access to Internet materials at the district level. If someone requests a site be blocked, it needs to go through the same process as a challenged book. The bulk of the blocking requests have actually come from librarians and computer lab aides who see blocking as a convenient way to enforce no gaming, no chatting, no e-mail, no jokes, not whatever rules.

 

Hear all about it

While I have not yet summoned the courage to listen to it, Tim Wilson over at the Savvy Technologist has a podcast interview with me from last summer uploaded.

Thanks, Tim. I think. Hope to see you at the MEMO conference this Friday and Saturday. Your presentation on Web 2.0 from last year's conference was outstanding!

Oh, by the way, I tried pod casting last summer here at the lake, but the walleyes still seemed to bite better on spoons and spinners.

Budgeting for books

Must be budget time since lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions asking “how do I determine a budget for print resources in my library?”

First, nearly the entirety of my accumulated knowledge about budgeting practices, pathetic as it is, can be downloaded from the workshop handouts, “Budgeting for Mean, Lean Times.” http://www.doug-johnson.com/handouts/budget.pdf Please use the information as you can.

For me, the quick and dirty of budgeting for print (and other things as well), has always been to establish a maintenance budget. Administrators tend to understand the wisdom of maintenance. They certainly have to do this when it comes to tuck pointing brick work, resurfacing parking lots, replacing carpeting, etc. Since a library print collection represents a major capital outlay, it too should be regarded as something that needs to be maintained.

My magic formula is simple. To determine the dollars needed to maintain a print collection you need three pieces of information:

• Size of collection to be supported.
• Life expectancy of the material.
• Average cost of a book.
  

How do these things get determined?

The supported collection size in our district was established some years ago using old library standards (when they were more quantitative and less qualitative) and then approved by the district library advisory committee. For schools of under 500 students we maintain a collection of 10,000 volumes; for schools of 500-1000 students we maintain a collection of 12,000 volumes; and for schools over 1,000 students we maintain a collection of 14,000 volumes. Your numbers may vary, but you should have them officially recognized as viable via a district advisory committee or your building administrator. (Note that collections, if not weeded will grow to more than the “supported” size. This is not a good thing.)

For life expectancy of the material, we chose 20 years. Too long, yes. Some materials will be worn out or obsolete in 5 years. Some Newbery Award winners will last longer than any child now reading them. Again, make sure the life expectancy is validated by people who are in a position to make budget decisions.

Average cost of a book is easy. Instead of using the School Library Journal figures that come out each spring, we take a few book purchase orders, add them up and divide by the number of volumes purchased. This reflects discounts, cataloging, shipping, processing etc.

So the formula is easy. It’s just collection size X rate of replacement X average book cost. Replacement rate = 100%/number of years in the life span of material. For our books this is 5% (100% divided by 20.)

So our 10,000 volume print collections need about $7.500 each year to be maintained if the average cost of a book is $15. If this amount is not spent each and every year, the collection will either get older (if not weeded) or smaller (if weeded). I strongly recommend weeding. See the handouts and “Weed!”

So how does the influx of commercial online resources impact this budget? Well, in only one way that I can see. We need to look closely at how large our supported print collections need to be. Currently at the elementary level, I don’t see a lot of print information being replaced by online resources – yet. But at the secondary level, we should look closely at how our reference and non-fiction collections are being used by our Net Genners. A small but vital print collection supplemented by good commercial online resources might better serve these kids' needs. (Or is is it, gulp, good commercial online resources that are supported by a small, vital print collection?)

I’d be delighted to hear from other librarians if they have found an effective means of determining ways to justify their library’s book budget.