Destiny Training at AIM in Monterrey, Mexico

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The school sent me to Monterrey for a three-day training session for Destiny, our library software, at the American Institute of Monterrey (AIM). Besides learning about all the benefits of Destiny's Library Manager and Textbook Manager, I had the opportunity to visit another school library and get more ideas for my own. Click on the AIM school logo above to view some of the photos from this visit.

Primary Students in the Library - Our First Visitors!

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The primary and preschool students visited the new library for the first time. All classes have been timetabled on a bi-weekly basis. This first week all classes had a quick tour of the library, review of expected library behaviour, and how to care for books. Afterwards, students borrowed books. For future library visits, storytime has been scheduled for the younger students and curriculum-related books will be organised for most classes with information literacy lessons.

Visit to American School Foundation (ASF) in Mexico City

Click on the photo for a slideshow of our ASF and Westhill visit

On Oct 13, Debby, my director in charge of the library and I, visited ASF and their four, yes, four libraries. Matt Borsage, the librarian of the upper library, spent four hours showing us around. It was a great learning and sharing experience. Thank you Matt for your generous spirit.

We learned many practical tips and ideas from this trip, including the proper and affordable process for plastic covering books, as well many useful contacts for furniture, signage and books.

We also visited Westhill Institute and looked at their primary, secondary and medical library. From Westhill, we learned that you could have strong, proper, steel shelving but also enhance it aesthetically with wood panelling on the edge. Luckily, the distributor for this is in Polanco and I will visit their showroom this week before ordering.

Library Inauguration

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Unbelievably, three weeks after my arrival at the school, the library is now moved upstairs and functional. Students will start using the library next week, but more likely the following week.

The directors, board members and heads of school arrived around 9:30am. When they last saw the library, it was an empty room. Now we are ready for business.

There is still lots of work to do - weeding, getting Destiny up and running, ordering of library furniture, and the whole collection has to be re-cataloged.

Still, it has been a rewarding experience to see it working so soon.

BTW for those of you in the know, this is my second library I've moved and opened in three months.

Library Evaluation for SACS

I've been at the school now for almost 3 weeks and I feel we are making good progress with several advantages: financial support for library furniture and collection development, a good existing collection and much support from directors. I've been weeding like crazy. It's the typical disease of a library and school - don't throw anything out. As any good librarian knows, this is detrimental to the development and maintenance of a good library.

I met early on Friday morning with the SACS - OSI (Overall School Improvement) team. I've been working on a list of recommendations for the library based on its existing status. This will be useful in two ways: for the SACS accreditation team to see that we are reflecting on how we can improve the library over the next few years and for budgetary strategies to see where the money will be best spent. For all my recommendations, I have stated which SACS standards it pertains to.

At this point, it is very much a draft - I have been here for less than a month. The SACS OSI Coordinator will be emailed a copy, my director in charge of the library, Deb as well as the librarian, Tina, who came in Aug (before I arrived) to the school and wrote up a report based on this two day visit. Tina is well-versed with SACS Standards, being a professional librarian, as well as being the wife to the current SACS president.

After everyone has given their feedback, we should have a finalised version by mid-Oct. Andrew Sherman, our SACS contact is visiting the school at the end of November, to ensure we are on the right track for the April 2009 visit. We are aiming to review this Library Evaluation with him then, and if needed, revised it according to his evaluation.

Moving up in the world!

About two thirds of the library collection has now been moved from the old library to its new location. We still do not have any furniture or shelving, but we are able to sort out books and place them roughly in the area they belong.

Sorting the books will be quite the task. The books have no labels, have never been cataloged and there is no catalog system. Basically we don't have a clue what is in the collection or a method of tracking their circulation.

For now we are separating and color-coding them into 5 categories: pre-school and kindergarten (red), primary grades 1-3 (green), primary grades 4-6 (blue) and middle school grades 7-9 (yellow). Suzy, the curriculum coordinator, showed us the best way to sort the books according to vocabulary, visual graphics and content and I came up with an Color Coding Guide to document her criteria. For Scholastic materials, there is the RL level which is the recommended reading level of the text. Points 4 to 7 here on the Scholastic website give a comprehensive explanation of the different reading levels used by this publisher.

After sorting all the books by grades, we can start organising each book itself. Essentially every book must be cataloged. This is quite a daunting task, but with Destiny we could not be a better position to do so. It has extensive database of MARC records for both English and Spanish titles and most of our English titles come from Scholastic and Follet, the provider for Destiny. Excellent!!!

Visit to the State Library of Hidalgo

Click on the photo above for slideshow of our visit.

On Tuesday we visited the State Library of Hidalgo in Pachuca to get some ideas. It's a new library and we managed to get another contact for library furniture from them, Krueger International.