Marketing Your Digital Materials

Course

Challenges in Marketing and Sharing Digital Materials [6:23]

Learn to rely on others in your professional circle for ideas and solutions
Learn how to get involved in the writing and reorganizing of curriculum in different departments
Learn different challenges that others have encountered in marketing their digital tools

The other thing that I often do as a librarian and as kind of like a person who just is always looking for more ways to do my job, is I find people who are really good at certain things. And we all have those people. And if you have somebody you follow in your social media world or in your professional circle, put it in the chat and share those people with us. And one of my people is Courtney Pentland and you probably, if you do a lot in the School Library Connection, you recognize this name because she publishes a lot and she is just an expert in so many different things in librarianship. And when I put out a tweet a little while ago asking how people shared their digital tools with their staff and their teachers and their students, she responded. And so this is one of the things that she said is that she likes to do live sessions with the teachers that kind of give them the overview of what is this database, what are the tools, how do I access them and then gives them time to kind of follow up a little bit and she puts tutorials on her library website. And I think those types of videos that we can either one, we could find them from other people who are using the same resources we are using, or we can slowly create our own as the year goes on, create one a month and just add it to wherever your staff goes to get the information you put out there. Then you have like a digital library of teaching for the staff and the students. And it says she has video and slide deck tutorials and her website, North Star High School Library, that's where she works, that's the link. She said, I could share that screenshot with you. It's very visually pleasing. It's very easily accessible. And as a teacher, I could go here— and a student— and see what is available. And they have they are very lucky. She has a lot of resources at her fingertips. I was very jealous when I saw all the stuff that she has access to.

Somebody put on one of their challenges is getting administrators and teachers to think that databases are necessary and valuable, and that made me, this is a Bitmoji that popped into my mind, like really, like we're still having that, like we have to prove that we need these things? Which is it's true, so we have to kind of be really creative and savvy on how we kind of get that word out and how we change the mindset of people who really do think Google is an end-all-be-all to the research world.

So these are the challenges that, I actually added some of them from what people had put on the document that you had filled out, so you might already see yours, oops, on here. Teachers say I'm going to make a little bigger teacher say it's just a little project. They can just Google it or the citations. How many of you can identify that they just like for a website, they literally put the URL and that's like citation for them. And I'm just like, no! I actually made citations one of my SLOs—is what we call them in Connecticut, like my learning objective for students— that we were going to learn what is a citation, why is it valuable, and how do we do it? Connecting the library resource types with the classroom assessment requirements. That can be very tricky because we don't have control over all pieces of that puzzle, right? So teachers that use the resources—oh, thank you—you gave them once, never asked again. Yup. Oh, this is, yup, that you need time to actually share with the staff. How many of us have been given access to something really amazing, but then given no training or time to help train the teachers, right? That is a very large problem that I've experienced multiple times.

So all of these things, I think are really kind of at the core. And I'm not going to lie. I don't have, like, the magic bullet for any of these. But I do think there are a few things you can kind of start doing. One of those things is I'm going to leave this up, so people can keep seeing it on the screen. One of the things that has been somewhat successful in my district is the librarians have been very vocal in trying to be involved in the writing and the reorganization of curriculum in different departments. And we were very involved in social studies for many, many years. And about three years ago, they started to revamp their curriculum because the state standard we had adopted—the I can't even think of what it's called right now, and I should know, not the common core, but the framework, the C3 framework for social studies—and the state made it their own. So we had to kind of adjust sixth, seventh and eighth grade what was going on. The librarians got to sit down and we have specific kind of like skills that are taught within each of those units. And we try to scope and sequence it from six to eighth grade. So introduction to databases happens in sixth grade. And I am theoretically guaranteed time in front of all sixth graders, teaching them what are the databases we have access to? How do I do a search that is not just typing in the question, but picking out keywords? And then how do I do the advanced search where I can use that and/or/not that's in most databases. So just being very involved in conversations and really advocating and not giving up when you're told no, because you probably will be told no multiple times. So that was one thing that we had started to do. And then the other thing is that we were invited because of social studies, we were invited to help with science when they revamped for the NGSS about four years ago now, three or four years ago. So I think once you can kind of get in a little bit with some of those people that are making those instructional decisions, you can make a little bit of a ripple and it just kind of catches on a little bit and it's been a little bit helpful.

Facing Challenges

From the teacher who says "Oh, it's just a little project! They can Google it" to the administrator who still need to be convinced that databases are necessary—it is your job as the librarian to face those challenges head on and show the benefits of utilizing your library's digital resources.

RESOURCES:

Course Packet

REFLECT & PRACTICE:

Using pages 6-7 in the Course Packet found in the Resources above, choose 2-3 problems that attendees of the Teaching Research Retreat mentioned during the event. Take those problems and brainstorm some ideas on how you would clear that obstacle or solve that problem in your library. Have you ever faced a challenge regarding your digital resources? What did you do to resolve it? Reflect on how that changed awareness of what the library could offer.

MLA Citation

Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials: Facing Challenges." School Library Connection, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267078?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.

Entry ID: 2267742

Additional Resources

Bibliography.

About the Author

Melissa Thom, MA, (she/her) is a teacher librarian at Bristow Middle School in West Hartford, CT. She spent 12 years teaching grades four to six as a classroom teacher, and eight years ago she earned her library media specialist certification. She is the president of the Connecticut Association of School Librarians, a 2019 AASL Social Media Superstar Reader Leader finalist, and a 2022 Library Journal Mover and Shaker.

MLA Citation

Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials. Challenges in Marketing and Sharing Digital Materials [6:23]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267078?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.

View all citation styles

https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267078?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903

Entry ID: 2267078