'What are you on about?' (says just about anybody reading this) Don't worry, I'm getting to it! ('Well get on with it!')
OK then, where to start? I've changed employers but not in the sense that you might think. The school I previously worked for converted to an Academy, oh, 4 and a bit years ago. At the same time it merged with the other secondary school in our little town thereby becoming a completely new school with a completely different name, uniform and a whole school's worth of staff and students to get to know. So, lots of changes.
For the first couple of years we were based on split sites that were 3 miles apart (*yay*) whilst our lovely brand spanking new campus was under construction. During the split site years I mainly worked on the site I had been based on for the preceding 6 years and a colleague working on the other. I spent the first 2 years of my Academy experience working 90% with KS3 students as they were based on 'my' site. At first it was a bit odd as I was used to having that balance of KS3 and KS4 students and I missed the contact with older students.
In terms of school library management though, it was a challenge! We had to shuffle our book stock between the sites (remember they were 3 miles apart!) with items appropriate to KS3 students coming to my site and the items more appropriate to older students being shipped over to the other site. As well as this we had to update/merge our library management systems - the KS4 site was still using Alice whereas I had been using Oliver for a few years. Once both the library databases had been upgraded to the latest version of Oliver we then had to decide how to make all of the cataloging consistent (because, believe me, it was a godforsaken mess!!) and then work our way through the records. A lot of this work was done manually. And. It. Took. Bloody. Ages!! But we did it - yay us! And, of course, this was all done whilst we continued to offer all of the usual activities and events that you would expect of a school learning resource centre (LRC) - after school homework club, accessible during breaks and lunches, chess clubs, special events (World Book Day, National Poetry Day etc), supporting teachers with resource requests/classes in the LRC, implementing Accelerated Reader [a whole other story that I'm not going to go into here apart from to say that it added massively to the workload with limited results], library loans/returns/overdues etc etc
You're probably thinking 'whew, that sounds like a lot of work' and you'd not be wrong. However, that wasn't all we had to sort out. Oh no! Remember that we were waiting for our new campus to be built? Well, about 18 months ago we began to prepare in earnest for the 'big move'. Cue a huge amount of sorting, decluttering and boxing up.
To give you an idea of what moving to a new school campus is like imagine trying to organise a house move whilst each room in your house is full of children who need to be kept occupied for about 6 hours a day while most of the furniture, books, displays, pens, pencils and even IT equipment are being gradually removed. Oh, and the children still need to be making progress in their learning while all this is going on around them. It also gets quite tricky to run a library when your books are all packed away.
The long and short of it is that we officially moved into our new build on 10th July 2015 (the students didn't move in until September 2015 - they were given an extra week of summer holiday to allow the staff to get moved in) where the process of unboxing, sorting and shelving started again (yes, I have done an awful lot of this over the past couple of years!). And I must say that my new LRC is lovely - I was involved in the planning process and am glad that many of my suggestions have been incorporated. It is a bright, open and airy space with plenty of seating (both workspaces and comfortable seating). It's also got lots of flexible space so can be reconfigured to fit the needs of different classes, events or activities. I'm also now based right next door to the English department and their office, which is great (I will blog separately about our collaborations on another occasion).
Hope that this post explains a little about my absence from the bloggiverse. I could bang on more (shutting up is not one of my fortes) but I will take a hint and sign off for now. Back soon. Cheers for reading.
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| July 2015 - my 'I'm in the new LRC' happy face |
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