Making school libraries welcoming [was Re: "Are libraries Obsolete

[Deborah Stafford <Deborah_Stafford@COMPUSERVE.COM>]

Just my thoughts on this.

I suspect most of us work hard on making our libraries warm and inviting.=
 I
also suspect that many if not most of us are open at lunch. Some of us
cannot be open at lunch due to circumstances beyond our control (lunch du=
ty
for example). Mine is open at lunch - my two heaviest traffic times are t=
he
30 minutes before school and at lunch. I enjoyed Barbara's pictures, wish=
 I
could post as well but we are not allowed to post ANY pictures of student=
s
on the web.

I do have one qualification on this idea -- warm inviting places don't
necessarily need a librarian to maintain. One of the other popular places=

on campus at lunch is the gym where they can play basketball.  At lunch t=
he
library offers in addition to a warm friendly place to be, a person who c=
an
help with that last minute project, a printer to print out that report,
some book browsing. My question would be; how can we stress not only the
warm inviting atmosphere but also the expertise and resources available i=
n
the room?

Also, like most of us I try to serve the teachers - helping them with
lesson plans, doing some preliminary research, teaching some of the lesso=
ns
where my expertise comes into play. =


One dilemma that I have - some teachers almost seem to resent my ability =
to
do these things.I sometimes hear  "I wish I HAD TIME to; find web pages,
read articles etc." Almost as if I am not really working but only having
fun.  I haven't come up with a good elevator speech for this.

Deborah J. Stafford
Gen. H.H. Arnold High School
Wiesbaden Germany
now proudly on the web at http://www.wies-hs.eu.odedodea.edu
Deborah_Stafford@compuserve.com

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