New Challenges

Having bitten the bullet and decided that I should join CILIP and do Chartership, what I've actually done is pay my membership fee and look at the PKSB. Which is rather daunting, to be patently honest. Jo Harcus has found a way of cutting through the bureaucratic language here, which I am minded to try when I get round to registering for Chartership (another £50 to CILIP - ka-ching!) but that's all going to have to wait until the summer holidays as I now have to get to grips with teen fiction, weeding/updating American history, working 32 hours a week and having a kind of social life.

As we Brits say, "mustn't grumble", and to be perfectly honest, I do love my job, and the fact that there is so much to do and learn here.

I was at a Youth Libraries Group conference  last week (more on that here) where we discussed emerging readers and how to get children to read, and I felt immensely lucky to work in a school where we don't have budget restrictions, and our pupils have scheduled reading lessons, and our teaching and support staff all love to read, and you can have a proper conversation about books without people thinking you're a nerd.

So although at the moment I know that Chartership must be done, I'm enjoying things as they are, and when I get home, I'm going to settle down with a nice book and just enjoy a good read.

Youth Libraries Group Eastern Region Unconference 2015: Emerging Readers

Opening the Book on Emerging Readers: An Unconference #ylgemerging
Youth Libraries Group Eastern Region  @YlgEastern

Saturday 18 April 2015, Rock Road Library, Cambridge

So, for the first time as a school librarian, I went to a conference! Well, an unconference, which is a free conference in a small venue where everyone brings cake.

Speakers on the day were Dave Cousins (author of '15 Days Without a Head', 'Waiting for Gonzo' and 'Misfits') and Professor Clare Wood from the Centre for Research In Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement, Coventry University (@CovPsychFRC), who spoke on 'Developing Emerging Readers'. Fiona Evans from The Reading Agency discussed the interventions and activities run by the Reading Agency, such as Chatterbooks (encouraging reading among reluctant readers at primary level) and the Summer Reading Challenge.

Afternoon discussions included reading schemes (including Accelerated Reader, reading groups and reading challenges) and how to get years 10 and 11 reading for pleasure.  More questions than answers were raised during these discussions, but most participants went away feeling that they were not alone in their thoughts about these topics.

I live-tweeted the conference using the hashtag #ylgemerging and the Storify is here:

New job, new sector, new blog!

As my move into school libraries has now become permanent, I felt it was the right time to start blogging again.

I worked in academic libraries for a decade, so moving into schools was, and still is, a learning curve, albeit a gentle ramble uphill and down dale rather than a steep climb akin to scaling Mount Everest. I have brought with me knowledge of cataloguing, classification and information skills, but I lack the in-depth knowledge of children's, teens and young adult fiction which seems to be the preserve of school librarians everywhere.

As well as the various rules, regulations and policies relating to Safeguarding (preventing child abuse and keeping children and young people safe from harm), a school librarian needs to understand the demands of the curriculum (which is always subject to change), the many and varied administrative procedures involved in running a school, and how the library service is competing with everything else for the pupils' time.

Add to that the requirement for lone working, the ability to instantly respond to a question with a valid answer and last, but not least, the expectation that you know everyone's name, and you find that's it's not that different to working in Higher Education!