Overview

I’m going into my seventh year as a librarian at North Stafford High School, so, naturally, that’s the school I chose to highlight for this visit! North Stafford’s library underwent a major renovation between April 2017 and November 2018. The final product was an award-winning facility that was featured in the 2018 American Libraries design showcase–the only secondary school to be highlighted, among sixteen public and university libraries. Our library is truly the heart of the school, and I am excited to show you all around my happy place.

Digital Access

The library website can be found on our school website under academics, or accessed directly via this link. I am the webmaster for our site, and try to keep it up to date with reading promotions, etc,. but I must admit it tends to be low on the priority list. What’s easier is to simply update the Bitmoji library (embedded on the home page) with announcements and new links. Currently, the summer reading suggestions are cycling through on an embedded Slideshow. The links on the left of the site allow users to navigate to contact information, book requests, our card catalog (also searchable from the widget on the main page), physical and e-book checkout. We’ve also provided links to our subscription databases, which we regularly use in instruction, and other useful resources (such as the Purdue Owl). Details on our two book clubs can also be found, as well as a specific page of Teacher Resources that I created using Symbaloo. We work to make sure the website is ADA compliant.

The Space

The NMC/CoSN Horizon Report identified a change in learning spaces as one of the ten “big themes of educational change”, stating “Learning spaces must reflect new approaches in education,” (as quoted in Rubin &Rubin, 2020, p. 151). The library is both physically and intellectually the heart of the school, centered between the academic wing and the cafeteria, directly in the path of thousands of students every day. We don’t have doors; instead, an open entrance that can be closed with a retractable gate (shopping mall style).

The key word during the design process for our library was “flexibility,”. Our furniture and shelving is all on casters so that it can be moved (relatively) easily. The circulation desk is right up front, and from there we can control all of the screen displays in the library. The café area has seating for up to 44, with eight tables and three booths. This also doubles as a teaching space, with a screen that comes down from the ceiling at the touch of a button. To the left is a designated Makerspace with six tables of varying height, as well as counter space and stools that allow seating for up to 40. This space contains a variety of everything hands-on, all the way from crayons and Legos up to 3D printers and drivable robots. A SMART TV and full writeable wall mean the Maker can also double as a teaching space. According to Rubin & Rubin (2020), “arts and crafts are actually the most popular activities in school makerspaces,” and I can say that has absolutely been our experience. Even high school students still love to color!

Behind the circ desk is the “Tech Couch”, eight Mac computers, and a student printer. The SMART TV in this space means we can also teach small groups here, or can easily duplicate displays if we’re teaching in another area and have more than one class at a time (or need to spread students out due to distancing measures). At the back of the library is another teaching space, with a projector and touch wall, and seating for 32. The far back left houses the Tech Lab, which uses three short-throw projectors to display on the entire length of the wall, creating an immersive experience for virtual field trips or movies–as well as being a teaching space. The back right contains the Z-Space lab, an addition that occurred right before we shut down due to the pandemic.

The righthand side of the library is lined with collaborative rooms that can house anywhere from two to eight people. Each room has a SMART TV and a writeable wall. These rooms are housed behind large etched glass doors that display historical figures (voted on by the community).

We have flexible seating throughout the library, including wobble chairs and cushioned cubes in addition to regular chairs, high-back chairs, and stools. We also have two of these individual study cubbies, affectionately called “the eggs”, that students love.

All of our shelving and seating areas are either ADA compliant height/distancing or can be height adjusted. The collaborative rooms provide quiet spaces for group work or neuro-diverse students who need it. The eggs are also surprisingly sound blocking, allowing for some solitude even when the library is in full swing.

Services and Intellectual Access

Rubin & Rubin (2020) stated “School libraries today focus less on the collection and more on the learners,” and I’d say they are spot on. We run two book clubs out of the library; a county-wide Battle of the Books initiative, and a group called Lit Nation, which is for staff and students. We also run a variety of reading promotion programs at special times throughout the year, such as Banned Book Week, Teen Read week, School Library Month, etc., and we change the book displays to align with special seasons or months (P.R.I.D.E, Women’s History, Poetry, African American History, etc.). When the library was newly renovated, we were discouraged from using obvious signage because it “aesthetically unpleasing”, so our shelf signs are all internal to the shelves. Fiction is organized alphabetically by the authors last name, but we also have genre stickers on each fiction book to help users find their favorites. The entire graphic novel section is housed on curved white shelves towards the front of the library, since those are fan favorites! Non-fiction is currently organized by Dewey, but I make it a point to always tell students during orientations that he was a racist misogynist, and we’re going to reorganize soon. The catalog is accessible via our website, but we also have it open on the front two Macs, and we have students download the app when they come through orientation. They also download our e-book app (Sora by Overdrive) during this time, and get a lesson on using it. In addition to the other shelving, we have a Multicultural section that contains books in other languages (mostly Spanish, but also French, German, and whatever we can find after consulting with the ESOL teachers as to which languages ae represented in the building every year), and a Quick Reads section that contains hi-lo fiction, non-fiction, board books for our Early Childhood Education classes. The Quick Reads section is something I’m considering eliminating; I think it’s beneficial to identify these books, but probably less stigmatizing to keep the QR spine label prefix and shelve them in with regular fiction.

We averaged 2000 drop-in visits and 95 class visits per month last year; on average, 30 of these each month were collaborative lessons. Teachers are able to reserve the Makerspace, Tech Lab, and collaborative rooms online, but they have to speak with a librarian to schedule space in the main library, because we want to get in their business and find out if their visit warrants a collaborative lesson! We do a lot of research skills and source evaluation instruction, but we can generally find a way to work ourselves into just about any lesson (there’s a database for that!). Last year, we cycled every single English class (50!) into the library twice per term, so everyone got an orientation (considering they’d almost all been out of the building for two years), a lesson on using the e-book platform, did Book Speed Dating and chose either Blackout or Spine Label Poetry. We plan to continue this practice next year, but will likely change up the lessons based on grade level now that everyone is used to being back in the building.

People

It’s unfortunate that, according to Rubin & Rubin (2020), just 61% of school libraries have full time librarians (as of 2019). Our library has two librarians and a full time assistant. We serve roughly 2200 students in grades 9-12 and about 180 building staff including teachers, paraprofessionals, custodians, administration, etc. We have a large population of English Language Learners, and a group of self-contained autism students. Students (and sometimes staff) drop in to use the computers, print, find a book, work on an assignment, or just hang out (though we limit the hangout-out time to non-instructional hours or lunch). Often, students need research help or are looking for book recommendations. Ms. Coffey our library assistant, does a fantastic job being the “face” of the library at the circulation desk, and also she interacts with students on a regular basis. My co-librarian and I are both white, and Ms. Coffey is African-American. Our student population is highly diverse. I would hope that no one feels uncomfortable in the library, but if they do, I imagine that it would be more related to kids who don’t see themselves as “smart” rather than being a cultural issue. We try to mitigate this with those class rotations, letting all students know that it is their library.

Collections

In addition to fiction, graphic novels, non-fiction, multi-cultural, quick reads, biographies, and e-books, we also have six Breakout Boxes and about 100 DVDs (this section was weeded drastically when we switched to a streaming service last year). We subscribe to six online databases supporting a variety of curriculum, and also have an e-edition of the local newspaper. Our databases all translate into multiple languages, have read-aloud options, and tools allowing highlighting or re-sizing of text. I hope that there aren’t major barriers, but one I can think of is the lack of obvious signage making it clear where collections are located. This is something we can hopefully work to fix next year.

According to Rubin & Rubin (2020), most school librarians “are committed to maintaining diverse school library collections and a majority of school librarians have developed specific goals for creating inclusive collections,” (p.165). This is definitely the case in our library. In fact, we plan to conduct a diversity audit of the fiction collection next year, in order to make sure it aligns appropriately with the demographics of our school.

Final Notes

I hope you’ve enjoyed this “virtual tour” of my library! I truly love my job, and consider myself incredibly fortunate to work in this fabulous space every day. Feel free to ask me any questions you think of, or point out any barriers to access that I may have missed to due obvious bias! I welcome your feedback.

Rubin, R. E. & Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman.