Managing the Elementary Library
Course
Communication [4:56]
You want people to know that there are great things happening in your library and that it is promoting student learning.
Thinking in terms of those special events, if you're bringing in special speakers, if you're having special days associated around authors or around books or around events you want to promote those different things. Promoting those new resources, if we're lucky enough to have a budget to able to add to our collection, we want people to know what those new resources that we're having in there. There should never be a doubt that everybody knows what the library is doing and offering. Then, when you thought about what, you want to think about how is the best way to do that. I think there's not just one great way to do this in terms of getting your message out, there's a multiple approach because you're going to hit multiple people, different people with different tools.
Thinking in terms about emails, I used to send out tons of emails. I learned that with my staff, short, sweet and to the point were the most effective. I made sure that we got everything they needed to know, but I might send them five emails to get it because I knew they would read them in smaller chunks as opposed to big chunks. You'll know your audience better on how that works, but that's how we used e-mails to communicate with our staff. Periodically we would also use-- Our school had a system where we could e-mail all parents and we were very cautious not to overuse that, but we would occasionally send out messages from the library to remind them of special events or things that were coming along.
We also did a monthly newsletter with our staff every month, here's all the great things happening in the library, and this was a great tends to showcase some of the projects that we were doing, it was a great way to promote collaborations so that administrators could see how we were working with teachers. It was good to bump up some of our teacher friends too by sharing the great things that they were doing. We had a library website, and our library website was the most hit website out of our entire school district. Now, that could be partly because I set the home page on every computer in our school to be the library home page, maybe. But it also could be that it became the hub of our learning resources in our school.
If anything was on our library web page it was easy for our students to access, it was easy for teachers to access and then when we would do projects we would make sure our parents were aware of it, so that they knew the library website was where the resources were that they needed. We embedded a presentation tool in the top to spin, to highlight different events, things that were going on. We embedded our Twitter feeds so that people could see some of our tweets. Any of those widgets and gadgets that you can make to make your library website more dynamic and interactive can be great.
We did have, now we're an elementary school, but we did have a Twitter account and a Facebook account. Now, we knew that those would not be typically the place that we should be finding our students, they weren't old enough based on the terms and limits, so we focused those two accounts on communicating with our parents. I would talk about the projects that we had going on in the library, or the special events, or the author visit, or whatever things were going on that we wanted them to see. We would share pictures when appropriate, and making sure that we are following our school policies with that goal, with that, but we want to make sure that they can see exactly the great things happening in our library, and social media was a way that we could make some of those parent connections.
The last two things is we also had a principal's update. Every month I sent my principal a report. It was one pager, was short and sweet, but it gave them exactly every class that had been in through for collaborative projects, or what projects we were working on. It spoke what my support staff was doing, I was lucky enough to have an assistant, so I wanted to make sure that they always knew exactly what that person was responsible for and what they were in charge of, and then I highlighted professional development that we were either involved of or that we were running for our school. Those were the main topics that seemed to be most important to my principal, so that's what I focused on.
The backside was a quick snapshot of circulation statistics that helped to tell the story that I wanted to tell. That was just a quick update that we sent every month, so that he always had an idea. Now, I was fairly fortunate, my principal was in the library almost every day. He would make a lap through the building, through every instructional space, so I always knew that he knew exactly what was happening in the library. But if you have one of those principals that doesn't, this could be a great way to help paint that picture for them if they're not getting in the library and seeing what's happening.
Finally, we always did a year-end report. One, it was a great time to do some reflection and thinking in terms of how the year went, but it was also a great way to celebrate all the wonderful things that had happened and all the wonderful people that have worked with us in the library. After we created the year-end report, we shared it far and wide, not only with our principal, but with our teachers. Making sure there were links on our library page to it, we use that as a great way to get out the message of what was happening in our school library.
Additional Resources
About the Author
E-mail: charvey@schoollibraryconnection.com
Twitter: @caharvey2
MLA Citation
Harvey, Carl A., II. "Managing the Elementary Library. Communication [4:56]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, January 2018, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2135533?learningModuleId=2135578&topicCenterId=2247903.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2135533?learningModuleId=2135578&topicCenterId=2247903
Entry ID: 2135533