Final Days

This week is my last week at Rider High School. I will have completed 120+ hours on Friday. This week, I have been focusing on finishing up my re-labeling project in the 500s section. As of today, I am FINISHED!

I have also learned about shelf-blocking this week. After I completed the new call number labels for the 500s, I went back and blocked each shelf - and they look good if I do say so myself! :-) Shelf-blocking is not something I remember talking about in my ILS classes, but Mrs. M said that most librarians find it very important. In order to "block" a shelf, each book is pulled forward to the edge of the shelf. There are also rules for books that do not fit properly on the shelf. After learning about shelf-blocking, I went back to my school library and realized it would be very difficult to keep my shelves blocked. Most of my patrons are elementary students, and I feel we are successful if they can use their shelf-markers and make sure the books get put back on the right shelf! However, after seeing Mrs. M's nice blocked shelves, I will definitely continue to notice how messy mine look compared to hers.

My experience at Rider has been a great one. I have learned a lot and I am going to miss spending time with Mrs. M! I will continue to email her and keep in touch though - she only thinks she is getting rid of me. ;-)

Social Media Woes...

Finally, after two weeks of working on it, I have made and synced a Facebook and a Twitter account for the Rider Library. This proved to be more work than I thought it would be. My first post on these social media sites was made last night. I have turned over the user names and passwords to Mrs. M so she can continue to use these tools to promote the library to her students and staff members.

This week, I have been working with Mrs. M to teach a freshman English class how to find articles and cite sources for their term theme assignment. Freshman year is the first year that students are required to complete a term theme, so everything is new to them. Monday, they learned how to cite and book and how to make notecards from a source. Tuesday, they learned how to use two online resources, Britannica Online and EBSCO Databases. And today, the students worked on finding their 3 sources. Once they found their sources and printed them, they spent time highlighting and categorizing important information from the articles.

Today, I worked one-on-one with a student who had been absent the last two days. We were able to get him completely caught up so he can have a good start on his term theme assignment.

Teaching this week has been a very good experience for me and has once again, given me ideas of how to present information to my students at school - even though they are much younger. It has also confirmed that I need to work in a school library! I am very passionate about helping students succeed, and enjoy anytime I get to be a part of them learning something new.

As for my relabeling project...I am up to 592 in the 500's section! Woohoo! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! :-)

Social Media...YIKES

So, last week I was to work on creating library accounts for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This is part of my internship project, "Promoting Our Library Programming in the Digital Age". However, I ran into a few snags that have set me back. Mrs. M and I both realized that we needed to set up the accounts without personalizing them to fit either one of us. What I mean, is that we do not want the Rider Library accounts to have our personal information, because if a new librarian ever took over, we would want her to be able to use the same social media accounts. This has required us to do some thinking and planning! We have now set up a NEW email address that is very generic, and have tied the accounts to it. This week, I will continue to work on learning how to utilize these social media tools to advertise items in the library.

Mrs. M and I spoke with several high school students who are faithful library users. They seemed very excited about the possibility of receiving "tweets" when new books arrive. They also like the idea of creating a social media community where rider library users can discuss what they are reading.

This week, I have also worked on cataloging new fiction materials for the library. I will post photos of these new titles on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter as soon as I learn how to! :-)

Troubleshooting with social media is helping me learn how I could use it in my school library as advertisement as well. I hope to set up a Christ Academy social media accounts for the next school year!

Project: Social Media

This week, Mrs. M assigned me to work on the social media aspect of the Rider Library. She gave me the task of creating Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts so that she can use them interchangeably at school. This task is a part of my internship project, "Promoting Our Library Programming in the Digital Age". I, myself, do not have any experience with Twitter or Instagram, so I am interested to see how all three can be used together to promote the library.

I will have to work on this project at home, because the school has all social media sites blocked so that students do not access them on school computers throughout the school day. Although it is blocked on the school computers, students can still access social media sites via their cell phone if they have a data plan, so using these sites for advertisement is still effective for many students. Those without data plans can access the library's social media sites at home.

I will post more about the process I went through to create these accounts once they are complete!