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Candidates communicate and collaborate with students, teachers, administrators, and community members to develop a library program that aligns resources, services, and standards with the school's mission. Candidates make effective use of data and information to assess how the library program addresses the needs of their diverse communities.
SLM 506 Curriculum Map of NDHS To be an effective educational partner, the librarian needs to be knowledgeable about the needs of the content-area teachers and know how to effectively guide them to the resources that could be useful to their teaching practices. During the collection development course I created a curriculum map for my high school. This map focuses on all of the courses my high school offers and provides the administration with areas that need work according to Maryland Library standards, as well as updated curriculum for some of the courses. According to AASL, the librarian “communicates and collaborates with students, teachers, administrators, and community members to develop a library program that aligns resources, services, and standards with the school’s mission…makes use of data and information to assess how the library program addresses the needs of their diverse communities.” In alignment with this standard, I created a chart where I divided the collection by Dewey number and assessed the circulation and age of each book. I found that while my school’s library meets the requirements, the average age of the collection does not. I drafted a letter to my principal with this information and created a list of recommended titles to add to the collection. This assignment required me to use my school’s data and circulation records to assess the collection and to develop a plan to help communicate to my administration how to resolve the issues with the age of our collection. Assessing the collection, and then providing the administration with possible replacement titles, allows them to have options on how to replenish the collection to make it meet the standards and to provide our teachers and students with more up to date resources. If there were more time available, I would have liked to include more teachers’ input as well as the some students’ input as well. By working with the teachers and students, I think I could have received more options and feedback on what was needed to meet their resource needs. Working on this assignment was no small task and knowing that now allows me to understand that because this is a very necessary task, I will need to ensure that I set aside time each year to review my collection and to make the necessary updates to it . In the future I would like to be able to assess my library collection using multiple modes of data from teachers and students, circulation numbers, as well as copyright dates. During my internship this year I helped my mentor librarian weed our 800s collection; there were many titles that were written in the 1920s and in very bad shape. Some of these titles had not been checked out in over 30 years! I certainly want to make sure that I can stay ahead of my collection needs and provide my patrons with the most updated collection that my administration and budget will allow. |