As I write this, I am in the midst of working with fellow teacher librarians in my district to prepare for an upcoming One Book, One San Diego event for our district's students, teachers, and staff members. This is the first time that we have managed to organize district-wide participation in our county's One Book event, and it has been inspired and enabled by our recent Sora eBook integration that allows single sign-on access to San Diego County Library's OverDrive collection. With the county library system offering no wait access to the One Book title, we've been able to invite widespread participation. This facilitated access has been life-changing!

When curating resources for this page, it is no wonder that the first community collaboration partner that came to my mind was the public library. This is indeed a powerful connection to pursue, and we are not alone in fostering this relationship. In a One-Question Survey that asked "How Do You Connect with Your Community?," the resulted showed public library collaboration "to be the most popular way to incorporate community into programming; 64% of responding librarians do this to some degree" (Gilbert 2019). If you are interested in initiating or further growing your public library collaboration, I recommend ALSC's toolkit (http://www.ala.org/alsc/publications-resources/professional-tools/school-public-library-partnerships).

When thinking about all that "community" may mean for a school library context though, the possibilities for connection are limitless. Working from a premise that community includes anyone who is not a student or staff member, there are many potential entities and ways for interacting. For instance, community members may include parents, professionals, and students across the world. And, collaboration may involve them as volunteers, guest speakers, and authentic audiences. There are so many possible combinations!

While the possibilities are wide open, I have identified three main themes when it comes to how school libraries may engage community:

1) Learning Authentically in Community

While I previously defined community collaboration as being with those outside of our schools, our schools are still nevertheless embedded within the communities that we share in common. Students are community members, whether looking at communities more immediately local or expansively global, and helping them recognize and embrace their role can be empowering. As reflected in Laura Gardner and Chaebong Nam's "Student Voice with the 10 Questions for Young Changemakers," it is about helping students move from a position of "I" to "we" so they may see how they are interconnected with others in their community, how they can be change makers. In school libraries, we may help facilitate these community-connected learning experiences, and some ideas for what this may look like are introduced in Tom Bober's "Learning in the Community: Supporting Authentic Projects from the Library" and Gina Seymour's video webinar "Makers with a Cause."

2) Infusing Community into Instruction

Within the field of education, teachers and librarians are used to assuming an expert role, but we neither need to nor should we presume we can fill this role alone. Collaborating with community members by inviting them into instruction is a wonderful opportunity to enrich and deepen student learning. In "Collaboration and Connection: A University Outreach Program for High School Librarians and English Teachers," the co-authors describe an academic library collaboration that reminded me of how my district's teacher librarians have also worked with state university librarians to vertically align our research instruction. For us, this collaboration fundamentally reset our approach to teaching research skills with students. Infusing the experience and expertise of the academic librarians into our instruction was pivotal.

The excerpt on curriculum partnerships from Community Partnerships with School Libraries: Creating Innovative Learning Experiences, expands on how inviting in local community experts of all kinds can support student learning. These experts may serve as in-person guest speakers, perhaps, but connecting virtually is also always a viable option and one that we are all becoming increasingly comfortable with these days with distance and hybrid learning. Of course, community members do not need to be "experts." A connection can be meaningful simply by exposing students to different voices, stories, and life experiences, broadening their perspectives and encouraging their development of empathy. As Sarah Betteridge encourages in "Six Ways to Connect Your Library and Students to the Rest of the World—From Down Under!," we have the potential to embrace our global community: "We live in a connected world and we owe it to ourselves and our students to go beyond the classroom walls" (Betteridge 2017).

3) Inviting Participation of Community

While there may be some overlap between the three themes for community collaboration, this final one focuses on how community members may be actively integrated into school library programs. Beyond contextualizing learning for students or serving as instructional experts or inspiration, this type of community collaboration requires two-way engagement. Revisiting public library collaboration, Daniella Smith provides practical suggestions and activities to explore in "Embracing Mutual Interest: Strategies for Collaborating with Public Librarians." Echoing my own district's One Book efforts, Angela Hartman details even more ways to involve the community around a common read with "From Wonder to Social Justice: How One Book Changed a Community." Finally, arguably the most intimate level of community participation is volunteerism. In "Management Matters. Enrich the Library Program with Volunteers: 'A Thousand Actions...End in One Purpose,'" Mary Keeling summarizes key ways to ensure success with volunteers, closing with how their participation may enable you to "enrich and extend your impact" (Keeling 2016).

Community collaboration, in general, holds vast potential to increase the impact of school libraries, and so I invite you to share how you have tapped into these connections with your library!

Works Cited:

Betteridge, Sarah. "Six Ways to Connect Your Library and Students to the Rest of the World—From Down Under!" School Library Connection, February 2017, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Article/2061164.

Keeling, Mary. "Management Matters. Enrich the Library Program with Volunteers: 'A Thousand Actions...End in One Purpose'." School Library Connection, May 2016, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Article/2016018.

Gilbert, Jen. "How Do You Connect with Your Community?" School Library Connection, March 2019. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/home/survey/2192819.

Learn about our One Book, One San Diego event at bit.ly/rst-tcue.