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This past November, I saw a post on our
North Carolina State Library blog about the new Competencies for Librarians Serving Children in Public Libraries.  After reading, I was curious to see how they compared to our North Carolina School Library Media Coordinator Standards.  Similar to other states, our NC SLMC standards are based on guidelines from AASL, ISTE, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, ALA/AASL Standards for Initial Preparation of School Librarians and other state standards.  After reading this document and noticing that it is geared towards those serving ages birth to 14, I decided to also check out YALSA’s Competencies for Librarians Serving Youth* since I am in a high school setting.

I wanted to see if there were areas where we overlapped that might be used to promote more collaboration between school and public librarians.  I noticed that we had similar standards although some of our elements may come under different standard headings.  Some key places for collaboration are education, resources and digital access, professional development and advocacy.  Below, I have listed standards from ALSC and YALSA that I felt correlated with our NC school librarian standards.   You can match up your own state’s school librarian standards where mine are listed.

Educational Practices
ALSC Standard I.5. Understands current educational practices, especially those related to literacy and inquiry.

ALSC Standard II.2. Instructs and supports children in the physical and digital use of library tools and resources, information gathering and research skills, and empowers children to choose materials and services on their own.

YALSA Standard II.1. Become familiar with the developmental needs of young adults in order to provide the most appropriate resources and services.

YALSA Standard VII.5. Instruct young adults in basic information gathering, research skills and information literacy skills – including those necessary to evaluate and use electronic information sources – to develop life-long learning habits.

NC SLMC Standard 1.a. School library media coordinators lead in the school library media center and media program to support student success.

NC SLMC Standard 4.a. School library media coordinators use effective pedagogy to infuse content-area curricula with 21^st Century skills.

In order to facilitate your local public librarians’ ability to keep up with educational practices, make a point of sharing any new state educational guidelines that are issued and also any school improvement initiatives that your particular school is implementing.  They may be able to facilitate your school meeting some of your initiatives.  Each semester I have the public librarians and the college librarians come in to do a session with our seniors before they start their Graduation Projects.  We instruct them on accessing the resources at the school library and also at the public and college libraries and review proper citation guidelines for using resources.  We are discussing also having them come in next year to do sessions with our juniors.

Resources and Digital Access
ALSC Standard II. 1. Creates and maintains a physical and digital library environment that provides the best possible access to materials and resources for children of all cultures and abilities and their caregivers.

YALSA Standard VI. 5. Be an active partner in the development and implementation of technology and electronic resources to ensure young adults’ access to knowledge and information.

NC SLMC Standard 3.a. School library media coordinators develop a library collection that supports 21^st Century teaching and learning.

There are a number of public librarians from different states that are creating student access policies with school librarians so students can have easier access to digital and print resources.  Charlotte-Mecklenburg in NC has successfully been running their One Access collaboration format for a year now.  Our county is looking into developing a similar program.  Currently our high school librarians have worked with the public library to provide digital access for our students.  If there is a resource that you think would benefit your students and it is something that your library cannot afford, see if it is available at the public library and if there is a way that your students may be able to access it.

Programming
ALSC Standard III.7. Delivers programs outside or inside the library to meet users where they are, addressing community and educational needs, including those of unserved and underserved populations.

YALSA Standard VII.3. Provide a variety of informational and recreational services to meet the diverse needs and interests of young adults and to direct their own personal growth and development.

NC SLMC Standard 4.c. School library media coordinators promote reading as a foundational skill for learning.

Who doesn’t want help with running a special program or author visit to your school.  Public librarians are also good sources for book talks, helping with Battle of the Books events or collaborating on a makerspace activity, especially if you haven’t created one of your own yet. If your public library is located where your students live, see if you can help with afterschool programs or a weekend program, that way your students can see you in a variety of libraries and become aware that both librarians are there to support them.

Professional Development
ALSC Standard VII.9. Participates in local, state, and national professional organizations to strengthen skills, interact with fellow professionals, promote professional association scholarships and contribute to the library profession.

YALSA Standard III2. Develop relationships and partnerships with young adults, administrators and other youth-serving professionals in the community be establishing regular communication and by taking advantage of opportunities to meet in person.

NC SLMC Standard 5.b. School library media coordinators link professional growth to their professional goals.

We all enjoy going to conferences, in part to exchange ideas with fellow librarians. But there is often the issue of lack of time and funds.  Why not set up a local one-day conference and invite local school, public and academic librarians?  I am a member of the Azalea Coast Library Association which covers several area counties; we are about to have our first one-day conference with participants from all types of libraries including librarians from our local hospital.  No one has very far to travel and the very low registration fee includes lunch.  Another idea is to set up an after-school or workday coffee break with your public librarians to share information about what is taking place in your libraries.

Advocacy
ALSC Standard V.6. Communicates and collaborates in partnership with other agencies, institutions and organizations serving children in the community, to achieve common goals and overcome barriers created by socioeconomic circumstances, culture, privilege, language, gender, ability, and other diversities.

YALSA Standard III.3. Be an advocate for young adults and effectively promote the role of the library in serving young adults, demonstrating that the provision of services to this group can help young adults build assets, achieve success, and in turn, create a stronger community.

NC SLMC Standard 1.c. School library media coordinators advocate for effective media programs.

Working by yourself to advocate for a strong library program may be difficult at times but working with all local librarians together could provide opportunities to showcase the benefits to the community of not only the school library program but also the public library program.  By collaborating on joint ventures, you will be better able to make the community aware of how library use from toddlers through young adulthood creates life-long learners, which benefits the community as a whole.

If you are the only librarian in your school you may sometimes feel (with budget and time constraints) that you have a difficult time meeting your own standards for evaluation.  Remember that there are also public librarians you can collaborate with to make it easier for both of you to meet your own individual goals.  Look through ALSC’s and YALSA’s competencies to find areas that you both share and that would benefit your program.  There are many more standards that overlap with our own school librarian standards. Comment with any ideas that you have for connecting one of your school librarian standards with ALSC’s and YALSA’s standards. Or, if you are a public librarian point out a standard that you feel you would be able to collaborate on with a school librarian easily.

*YALSA’s revised standards are due to be published in the summer of 2016. Visit this link to see a draft of the updated competencies.

Joann Absi is the media coordinator at Eugene Ashley High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is a member of of the AASL/ALSC/YALSA Interdivisional Committee on School-Public Library Cooperation and currently blogs for Knowledge Quest. 

The post Gimme a C (for Collaboration!): How Our Standards Relate and Interconnect appeared first on ALSC Blog.

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http://www.corestandards.org/

In teaching my class this semester at NYU and in talking to authors, I’m often struck by how often I am asked whether something is typical or standard within the industry, and this is probably one of the most frustrating things that writers have to deal with. While certainly with publishers there are a lot of things that are considered industry standard, this isn’t always the case with agents.

Just recently, for example, I was asked by a reader whether or not it’s standard for an author-agent agreement to be in effect for one year. And my answer is yes, and no. For some agents and agencies it is; some do contracts that are for a certain number of books and for a certain time frame, allowing what the agent feels is sufficient time for them to have to sell the project. Other agencies, BookEnds included, has a contract that is unlimited and hopefully for the life of your career. While we don’t have a time frame on our contract we do have a rather easy termination clause to allow any party the ability to get out of the contract at any time.

So if few things are standard between authors and agents, what are they? Typically commissions are standard. Most agencies take a 15% commission on domestic sales and rights sold through the publisher and 20% on foreign rights. It is standard that you should not be paying any upfront fees to your agent for any reason. Not only is it standard, but it’s part of the AAR’s Canon of Ethics.

And I think that’s it. The rest is a matter of comfort to you and if there’s ever anything in the author-agent agreement you are not comfortable with or don’t fully understand, you should talk to the agent about it. If you’re not comfortable doing that then maybe you should first question whether this is the agent for you.

Jessica

I’ve been telling everyone who will listen about Paul Waelchli’s work mapping the ACRL Information Literacy Standards to skills used to play popular videogames. I’ve been waiting for someone to do the same thing for school libraries, and now we have our first step towards that goal because Brian Mayer has mapped New York State’s education standards to some modern board games.

Gaming, School Libraries and the Curriculum

“Games engage students with authentic leisure experiences while reinforcing a variety of social, literary and curricular skills. When an educational concept is introduced and reinforced during a game, it is internalized as part of an enjoyable experience and further utilized as one aspect of a strategy to attain success.

Games also carry other benefits. They help students connect and build social skills, working as part of a team or negotiating the most advantageous situation for themselves. It also provides an opportunity for students to to explore a host of life skills not inherent in the curriculum , but important for success. Some of these include: micro-managing resources and options; actively re-evaluating, re-prioritizing and re-adjusting goals based on uncertain and shifting situations; determining acceptable losses in an effort to obtain an end goal; and employing analytical and critical skills to more authentic social experiences.

Here is a list of NYS standards currently supported by a well established school game library:

NYS Social Studies Standards:

• Standard 3: Geography Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography of the interdependent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the distribution of people, places, and environments over the Earth’s surface.
  • Ten Days In.. Series
  • Ticket to Ride Series
     
• Standard 4: Economics Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources, how major decision-making units function in the U.S. and other national economies, and how an economy solves the scarcity problem through market and non-market mechanisms.
  • Catan Series
  • Puerto Rico” [Library Gamer]

Several more are listed in the post, so please click through to see just how good a fit this can be.

If you still question whether there are literacies (especially information-related ones) involved in playing videogames, ask yourself if those same things happen around playing board games. If your answer is that yes, they do, what then is the difference between learning those skills through board games and learning them through videogames? Brian’s work helps illustrate the similarities but even more importantly, it shows how easily a school library could start out with the familiar world of board games as a way to implement gaming services and engage students more interactively in learning information literacy skills. Thanks, Brian!

David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington. Kevin Coe is a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. They are authors of the The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by them click here. In the post below they look at Huckabee’s recent attack on the press.

With John McCain looking to wrap up the Republican Party presidential nomination, challenger Mike Huckabee is just looking for a way to remain relevant. Earlier this week, Huckabee tried going on the attack against a familiar target: the press.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters from the Christian Science Monitor, Huckabee decried journalists’ focus on his religious background, saying: “There has been an attempt to ghettoize me for a very small part of my biography. The last time I was in the pulpit was 1991.” (more…)

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Hands up, US readers...how many of your places of work have the Library Bill of Rights displayed somewhere in a public area in your library?

Second question. Are the non-librarians on your staff familiar with the Library Bill of Rights?

We got to musing on the visibility of these Rights when the small team working on our forthcoming report wondered among ourselves...have you ever seen the Library Bill of Rights displayed in a library? And the answer was, "no."

Why not, we wonder? As the document states: "...the following basic policies should guide their services." Shouldn't the people served in libraries know what the service promises are?

If you have the Library Bill of Rights displayed (or your country's equivalent), please let me know! And if you don't, tell me why not. Also, they haven't been amended since 1996. Do they need to be?

I do think it a bit odd that "libraries" stand in for "librarians." (That's a synecdoche for you non-English majors) It's as if doctors' codes referred to hospitals' responsibilities to patients--which they don't.

One criticism I have read about libraries' codes of ethics is that the individual practitioner is not explicitly held accountable (more on codes of ethics in a future post). Certainly, there are no librarians in the US LibraryBill of Rights.

In case you've forgotten, these Rights are:

I. Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves. Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.

II. Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Material should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgement of free expression and free access to ideas.

V. A person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.

VI. Libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.

Adopted June 18, 1948. Amended february 2, 1961, and January 23, 1980, inclusion of "age" reaffirmed January 23, 1996, by the ALA Council.

You know it’s true. I’ve known Eli Jacobowitz since before he was born and now he’s a smartie techie type with a newish blog about technology and education. Though he admits “IANAL”, he has written a nice post about why cataloging both sucks and rules and talks about the future of cataloging in a world where there is much much more information than there is “trained professionals” to help people make sense of it. Ultimately, the answer lies in standards, and this librarians already know.

Eventually, robots might catalog for us. (Librarians shudder.) What we now know is just how far away that is - bot catalogers will need much better AI than currently exists. But in order for this project to even be possible, we have to make our data bot-readable. That means implementing some of the cataloging technologies invented and refined by librarians over the centuries.

We need to standardize meta-data format and content. Digital resources need not only meta-data but also meta-meta-data describing the standards they conform with. Catalog and search solutions need to read this information and pass it on when communicating with other systems.