Rae's January Blog

Part 1 Inventory Prep: Weeding as a First Pass

As BVSD's Bond and Innovation work progresses, many libraries will be undergoing remodels and renovation to create more open, flexible, and participatory spaces. Library collection sizes and shelving will be reduced to accommodate new library layouts. So, how do we prepare to reduce the size of our collections while maintaining its relevance and appeal? Think of it this way, where we used to have a large, rambling garden to tend, we will now garden by the square foot. A square foot garden has the potential to produce a huge amount of vegetables in 20% of the traditional gardening space but only if it’s curated mindfully. Mindful gardening means regular and continuous weeding of the square foot plots to ensure the plants are not crowded out by thistle, dandelions, and bindweed. Mindful collection development of the library includes regular, continuous, de-selection of the weeds!

Low Hanging Fruit


Before you start a formal inventory, conduct a quick weeding first pass. Use the Find/Add feature within Insignia and look for following Material Types; magazines, DVDs, Maps, equipment, etc. These are the large, conspicuous, and obvious weeds in your garden-the low hanging fruit. A Material Type search will also yield items you may not even realize have been cataloged. For example, Insignia searches have found AlphaSmarts, TV’s, and filmstrips in collections. Delete these items from the catalog if they are truly no longer in the collection. If these resources are in fact in your collection (occupying shelf or storage space), determine if they still provide value to your patrons or are they obsolete and can be weeded. If you are keeping these items, run an inventory on them and make sure the database and the physical item counts match.

Fuzzy Food

Weeding can be a daunting task. It takes bravery to determine the fate of a book that is still in good shape but rarely circulated, was donated by a much loved and long-retired teacher, or was your favorite title as a child. The thing to hold in mind while weeding is that a school library needs to be refreshed regularly to remain relevant and appealing to patrons. Books per student is no longer an applicable measure of a good library. The Colorado Department of Education's Highly Effective School Library Program no longer includes books per student on their evaluation rubric. The new program focuses on the quality and relevancy of the collection, not collection quantity. It's no longer about having enough books per student but having the right resources for your students.

Weeding your the collection is sort of like cleaning out the fridge. A full fridge with old lunch meat and moldy applesauce is not appealing. Who wants to browse a fridge that has fuzzy food in it, even if there’s good food among the fuzzy food? Students and staff may be put off by crowded, outdated, unappealing, and damaged books. Check out this fun blog post Crying over spilled milk, by Gail Dickinson, that summarizes this analogy beautifully.

BVSD Policy for deselecting library materials relies on the CREW Method: Continuous Review, Evaluation, and Weeding.

The CREW method relies on the MUSTIE acronym to help you identify when an item should be considered for weeding.

• Misleading and/or factually inaccurate;
• Ugly (worn out beyond mending or rebinding);
• Superseded by a new edition or a better source;
• Trivial (of no discernible literary or scientific merit);
• Irrelevant to the needs and interests of your community;
• Elsewhere (the material may be easily borrowed from another source).

Combine MUSTIE criteria with a formula for pulling books based on age and number of years it has been since it was last circulated. Here's the formula:

5/2/MUSTIE

5 = the age limit of relevancy for that Dewey classification

2 = If it has been two years since it has been checked out, then the MUSTIE criteria for weeding.  

This formula isn't written in stone but it can serve as a guideline for you to apply to a Least Circulated Items report for Fiction, Everybody, and non-Dewey collections, and the Items To Be Weeded report from a collection analysis (from Makin or Follett) to develop a weeding plan.

Try it! Armed with the MUSTIE criteria pick a shelf and start pulling a books and use the process outlined in Best Practices: Deselected Library Materials to box up weeds for warehouse pick up. Remember, you'll need to delete all weeded books from Insignia to keep the database accurate, it'll help Inventory go smoothly as well.

Share data from reports and the MUSTIE formula with trusted aides or parent volunteers and assign them a shelf, section, or Dewey category range, and let them take a first pass at pulling potential weeds. You will make the final decision as to whether or not a resource is deselected but recruiting help will speed the process of picking the low hanging fruit.

Be sure and review the resources listed below that can aide you in the process of collection development and maintenance. The three titles highlighted below are all available in the OverDrive Teacher's Lounge Professional Development Collection. The Crash Course title is particularly timely and helpful.

Next month's blog will dive into the Inventory process. Inventory will be less frustrating after you've taken care of that low hanging fruit! Feel free to comment below about the treasures you've found, the bloopers you've weeded, and any other tips and tricks you'd like to share about weeding.

Resources

Professional Development titles in the OverDrive Teacher's Lounge

  

Inventory

Weeding and Deleting

Shipping label

Collection development

Collection Development PLC

BVSD Materials Selection Policy

Guest Blogger - Jolynn Scott

Coding Unplugged

Jolynn Scott, Teacher Librarian-Coal Creek Elementary

Can Elementary Kids Code? 

I am not a coder. I've seen others do it but I don't know how to write code or program myself. That's why when I was introduced to the Hour of Code program by Nick Cady (a parent, and computer teacher at Centaurus High School) I panicked! He wondered if I was going to have our students participate and I choked! Surely, that's not something elementary kids can do, I thought. He assured me that they could, indeed, do it, and asked me to just try it, myself. After my initial attempt I was hooked and knew kids would be too.

Hour of Code is an online application that teaches kids how to write code & program. It was created to introduce and engage students in learning about computer programming at a very early age. The Hour of Code is the kick off event each year for International Computer Science Week. New, kid-friendly modules are added each year based on pop culture ideas such Minecraft, Star Wars, Frozen, and this year's Moana.

Hour of Code has been a huge success at Coal Creek and after a couple of year I decided to expand the idea by introducing Coding Unplugged, which we do the week before Hour of Code. Coding is less about the device and more about the process, which is why I like the unplugged aspect. I found this lesson for a paper-pencil coding activity through Thinkersmith, called My Robotic Friends. It involves using directional arrows to program a series of movements to create shapes using plastic cups. I especially like this activity because not unlike some of my students the library doesn't have a lot of devices, so I wanted to teach kids that they can think through these programming steps without any technology at all. In addition to the critical thinking involved, this lesson also uses collaboration, communicating with precision and clarity, persisting, and striving for accuracy-all elements of our mindful school's Habits of Mind philosophy.

I used all the templates in the Thinkersmith lesson but soon learned we had to create some new symbols. For example, moving forward and back arrows are for movement with cups in hand but there was no symbol for moving the robotic arm (empty-handed) back to the original starting point, so we created our own symbols using the original ones as a starting point. We created open arrows (not filled in) to show these are movements up, down, forward, or back, with an empty hand.

I started by demonstrating the easier shape (three stacked cups to three pyramid cups). The whole class helped create the code on a white board. We then got some unsuspecting person to act as a tester, a parent volunteer, or teacher passing through the library, to run our code and see if it worked and make provide feedback/corrections when necessary.

Program, Test, Modify

Next, I put the students in teams of four, and started with a cup stack of three (or six, for older kids) and a cup shape. Each team had a different shape to program. In each team two students were the coders who create the steps. One student was the recorder/scribe who wrote down the steps, and one student was the robotic arm that executed the code. Once their code was complete students switched tables and tried to run the other teams program. Younger students were all given the same, easy, shape to program.

A-Ha Moments

There were many a-ha moments for students (and for me) as we did this seemingly simple activity. The first was changing the original arrows to account for the empty-handed moves. Students began going rogue and creating their own cup shapes to code. Part of the rogue initiative was finding that there was no symbol for moving cups in front, and behind, giving us a three-dimensional cup shape rather than two-dimensional. Next year, I will change the key again to allow for front/back movements, as well as up/down/right/left.

Once we did these unplugged coding activities it was much easier for the students to apply that knowledge to the Hour of Code modules. I used library class time to take all classes to the lab to introduce Hour of Code. It didn't take long for students to become highly motivated AND independent.

Engage Students & Parents

I sent all these activity links to parents via email so kids/parents could continue to work and learn at home. I got many emails from parents thanking me for the activities. My favorite was this picture, from a parent of a student who struggles, academically. She simply wrote, "My house, last night."

I answered, "How adorable! I'm so glad the kids were motivated to do it. It's GREAT brain food! (And...I think programming is the job of the future!)"

She replied, "I agree with you and, if you have a kid who struggles with one sector like I do, excitement about coding makes me really happy."  

Finally, last year I created a slideshow explaining Coding Unplugged to parents. You can view it, here.

Guest Blogger - Colleen Jiron

Breakout with Dewey!

Colleen Jiron, Teacher Librarian-Community Montessori Elementary

Fun Way to Reinforce Dewey

We revised an existing Breakout challenge from Breakout.edu to use in our Dewey Decimal Numbers and Library procedures lesson. These are lessons we cover every year, but I have to say, this was a much more creative and fun way to reinforce it, especially when followed up with an online game called "Order in the Library" which is free from UT Austin (students do NOT use their full names).


We had three rounds of combined 4th-5th graders and they loved it! The original Game is called Library Interview Breakout by Mia Beesley (please email me to access the password for this Breakout).

We Broke Out!

Two of the classes successfully solved all 4 of the puzzles and opened the Lockbox. The third group failed to solve the last puzzle, which is a lesson in coping with "failure." I gave everyone "prizes" for participation (those cool bookmarks from Demco that can be colored like personal mandalas), and the two successful classes also had their pictures taken with a large poster "WE BROKE OUT!". Some students commented that "this was the best lesson we ever did" and "we should do another one of these!"

Debrief and Reflect

We followed up with a debriefing discussion, with classes describing what they could have done differently or better. That was pretty interesting. Comments like "communicated better with all groups," and "remained on task instead of getting distracted," as well as "getting organized and reading everything before we started" were apropos and right on target.

For more detailed instructions, see the link above for the original Game by Ms. Beesley, and click HERE for my revised instructions."