It takes a team to run a library - meet the team

Last Friday we ran our Student Librarian training day. We have 38 wonderful student librarians. The student lead librarians ran their teams through their paces, teaching the new librarians and coming to terms with the changes to our software system. We have a different team every interval and lunchtime throughout the week. The lead librarians run their teams, allocate roles and check the quality of the work completed. We are a busy library and really rely on these wonderful volunteers.

Happy New Year

When is it impolite, redundant, careless or even insulting to wish someone Happy New Year? Is there a social etiquette about this? I think if you haven't seen them since the start of the new year it is still perfectly acceptable but I am open to correction.

Anyway - I know it is almost at the end of February and this is my first post of the new year. What can I say? It has been a BUSY start to the year.

Here is a photo of three of the four of us in the library team in our new library. As you can see there is still some work to do but we are standing where the issues desk will be.

Going on a summer holiday

For those who can afford it Novel Holidays looks very appealing. Not only do they do literature trips but they also propose the kind of holidays that people can then go and write a novel about.

Great fun.

As for me - it will be a summer at home, then at my folks bach at Rangitata - reading books of course while my guys fish for salmon.

Getting Kids to read...

Working on WEb 2.0 for school libraries

It has been my week for inspiration from colleagues. At a School Library Network meeting I met Jill McGregor from Glenfield College. She has just begun a library wiki for her school library. She wants it kept quiet for a while but it looks great. Then when I get to school on Wednesday i find a colleague in Australia wants to work on web 2.0 for school libraries - some training, skills, examples type things.

It is great to look at each other's work, to assist each other learn new technologies and apply them successfully to our libraries.

So what have we got that can be used in school libraires? Let's begin some lists
Wikis are great for collaborative learning
Delicious for classes bookmarking useful sites for research
Blogs for sharing views and information
Flickr for sharing photos
You tube and teacher tube for video

That's just to start off the top of my head. I wonder about trying twitter to track research progress or for staff to log what they are doing over a week to see if you need to increase library staffing.

By the way there are a few changes I want to make to this blog page but I need to spend longer than two minutes to figure out how to do that and at this time of the year.... so when I do I will add the Hub and artichoke

Sound of one hand typing

Welcome back to term four. So far for me it has been quite a challenge personally. I have injured my right hand so no writing or blogging for a couple of weeks.

We have changed library software and now use AccessIt. This is a great programme but of course with any data transfer there are a few technical hitches.

We have had two very large rocks through library windows at the start of this week AND as if that wasn't enough smashing I had a small car accident (no injuries just me feeling really stupid).

Hope to blog more next week. Happy long weekend - read a good book...

Book bites for the holidays

Week 7: Creating a community of readers. The workshop I mentioned last week also included staff. Here at TGS we try to develop a community of staff readers by inviting everyone to have morning tea in the library in the last week of term and choose some holiday reading. we pull out all the adult fiction and non fiction (one of the joys of working in a high school library is we can buy adult fiction) and place it on the tables. Staff cruise the tables and displays and shelves, drinking coffee, eating our home baking and sharing thoughts about the books they have read. Some thing we started four years ago has now become a tradition.

I am off for two weeks for a happy holiday.