SLSA (School Library Systems Association) – Executive Board

SLSA is an organization comprised of all of the SLS directors across New York State. If you are an SLS director – this is your prfessional team of colleagues. You’d be crazy not to join! These are the only other people in the state (in the world really) who understand what you do! The SLSA Executive Board met on a cold January day (1/26/07) at the Onondaga-Cortland-Madison BOCES in Syracuse. The team took a few minutes from our work to pose for this shot.

This dedicated group of hard working SLS directors from across the state was focused on this day. We had so much work to do in preparing for Lobby Day, for the Otesaga Conference, and for SLMS 2009. In addition to all those topics, we had much discussion on the process we will follow to ensure that our schools get the very best possible pricing for their online database across the state.

This year, it is my honor to be the president of this group – trying to lead the leaders, so to speak.

You’ll see here some past presidents of SLSA, Judy Dzikowski, Sue Bartle, Dee Portzer, John Monahan and Allison Wheeler are here.
In the back on the right you’ll notice our next SLSA president, Elizabeth Naylor-Gutierrez. I’m sure there are some future SLSA presidents in this photograph as well!

Judy Marsh and me @ Geneva High School

My colleage, Judy, is the SLS Director at the Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES. She just hosted a great conference with presenters Gail Bush and Vivian Vande Velde. This was a great opportunity for me to hear some wonderful speakers and to meet librarians from a different part of the state. Guess what – the concerns are pretty much the same. How can we get kids to read more? How can we squeeze our limited dollars to get more resources for kids? How can we engage teachers in information literacy concepts integrated into content area? I had a wonderful time at this conference in Geneva NY and I learned some things too!

Zoller Elementary School

The most interesting part of this position is the opportunity to make visits to school libraries and to meet so many great school library media specialists. No two libraries and no two librarians are alike!

Here is one of our system’s newest members. Kristen Majkut started her position with the Schenectady City Schools in September of 2006. I caught this photo of her when I visited her in the Zoller library on January 18, 2007. How do we know that Kristen is a frequent technology user? See that flash drive hanging from her lanyard. She’s never far from her important files!

Kristen splits her time between Zoller Elementary School and the Steinmetz Career Center – so it’s a bit of a schizophrenic job. But she has lots of energy and enjoys working with students at both levels – elementary school and high school.

One interesting thing about the library at Zoller – there is a real fireplace in this library. Of course it hasn’t been used for years but it makes for a cozy atmosphere on a cold January day!
The Capital Region BOCES SLS welcomes Kristen and I look forward to seeing her at meetings and staff development sessions. You will all enjoy getting to know her!

BOCES Professional Development Sub-Committee

Ha! Fooled you! Not a single one of the people in today’s photo is a librarian – except me, of course.
As a SLS Director, you are a part of the larger library community, but you area also a part of your BOCES community and that is where I was today. This group is a sub-committee of the over 400 people employed at BOCES. Our charge is to identify a vision of an overall professional development plan for our schools (Special Education and Career and Tech. Center) as well as for the educators in our component districts. This includes everything from bus-driver training and “Right To Know” training, to literacy training and even to our Information Fluency curriculum design project.
It is huge project and I’m proud (and a little overwhelmed) to be a part of it. On this day we were reviewing the charge and trying to determine what a long-range plan would look like.

From the far left – Karen Rattman is our facilitator, guiding us through the whole process. Tracy Gyoerkoe is the Curriculum Director for the Career and Tech Center, Marie Brander (front left) is an administrator at Maywood School, DevenHorne oversees professional development for all of the Special Educators, Hilary Delevare is a NERIC trainer (she may have trained you!). Pat Gogol works in the area of violence and substance abuse prevention in schools. Amy Svirsky is the BOCES Data Analyst specialist – and then there’s the librarian!

Cathy Welling had to leave early and is absent from the photo – she is a trainer for schools in the areas of violence and bullying prevention.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Today was the MLK holiday in mid January. We honored Dr. King this year by staying indoors by the fire and listening to the trees pop in our neighborhood. This was the view from my back window! Ice everywhere and I was happy to be home today!
My position here is a 12 month administrative position. This means that I do not work the school calendar. We have all of the national holidays off, of course but during the February break, the spring break and Christmas break we are working. While that may not sound like a good thing to you, there are certain advantages. We do, of course, accumulate a certain amount of vacation time that we can use pretty much when we want. So we can take our vacations at OUR convenience rather that at the dictates of the school calendar. If you think you might like to take some time off in, say, October, rather than trying to beat the crowds during February break, this may be the job for you. If you have little ones and need to be home when they are home – then now may not be the time for you to consider being an SLS director.
If, however, you prefer a little more flexibility AND off-peak rates, this may be for you!

MATRIX DESIGNERS

Our SLS is in the throes of an Information Fluency Curriculum design project. Many small groups of media specialists have had a hand in this project and the work can be seen growing on our website (www.crbsls.org). Now we are engaged in the design of the K-12 Matrix. Eventually we hope to take this matrix to a P-16 project. Here are the folks who have worked on the matrix thus far. The completed matrix should be posted soon.
A big part of the job is bringing people together and enabling them to do their best work. That has surely been happening with the Information Fluency Curriculum. All of us are so much smarter than any one of us! This project is ongoing! Forward!

Who are these people? (Standing L to R) Beth Davis, Mindy Holland, Clare McNally, Sonji Greenaway, Cyndi Hoffman, Steve Davidson, Lisa Correa, Liz Bailey.
Seated (L to R) Mary Ratzer, Donna Phillips, Jill McGrath.

CDLC's COIL???

Ah, librarians love acronyms. If you speak MARC, ALA and ILL, then you speak library talk. One part of my job is to represent my schools at meetings of the larger library community. The Capital District Library Council is a regional organization that looks out for the interests of all kinds of libraries in the area, school, public, academic and special. This past Wednesday I represented school librarians at the COIL meeting – Committee on Interlibrary Loan. The group meets monthly. The burning issue at this meeting was whether or not the committee should expand the vision and change the name of the group to the Committee on Resource Sharing (CORS).
There was a WOW! moment at this meeting. Greg Kiel from the library at SUNY Cobleskill did a demo for us on an ongoing trial with an electronic ILL program called ILLIAD. This is being tested in a few of the academic libraries right now and we talked about the possibility of this system working embedded in SIRSI/DYNIX. Electronic ILL has long been a goal and we’ve not seen too many programs that actuallly make it work. This one shows great promise. WOW!
You know all those acronyms, right?

No Prescription

Evidence-Based Practice

This year’s Evidence-Based practice group is working hard at defining their goals and developing their action plans. This is not as easy as it looks or as hard as it sounds. Does that make sense? The idea here is to use a supportive group of critical friends to change one thing about your program. Each participant is asked to determine one project they want to work on that will improve student achievement through the library program. Each one determines the status quo, implements the change and then gathers evidence of the impact of that change. Then, we make the evidence public in the learning community.
We all begin by “Reading Ross” as our facilitator, Mary Ratzer, puts it. We read as much of Dr. Todd’s work as we can until we digest the process. Then, we go beyond reading and we actually do something!
Eureka! For some, it is difficult NOT to take on too much. We emphasize over and over that baby steps have power! Sure you’d like the whole fourth grade to be getting top scores on their tests, or make a great scientific discovery. But how about we begin with one classroom, one teacher, one unit or lesson and boost it up. Maybe even a small group in one classroom. If we can make one small change and show that it made a difference for kids, we’ll find it easier and get more support for another small change, or maybe even a slightly bigger change.
The group is supportive and empowering. We meet once a month from October through April (not December!) from 4 – 6 pm.. Then we all enjoy a full day with Ross Todd in May.
We always share a light supper and a little fun before we get down to work.
Here are four of this year’s 17 participants, Claudia Crandall, Carol Kadamus, Kim Ringer and Jeanne Bush.

Budget time!

It’s January and so it is budget time. This is the time of year when we set the budgets for the following fiscal years in the cosers. So Library Automation, Non-Public Textbooks, Database Consortium and Instructional Media budgets have to be done NOW! Adjustments have to be made in salaries and benefits, retirement, social security – all that good stuff. This is what they call a “time sucker”. It literally takes hours with a spreadsheet and a ruler and pounds of paper. But once it is done – I feel good about the plans we have made for the following year. It also give me some practice with my math skills – the ones I said I’d never use! Ha!
School Library System budgets get done in April or May – so I’ll be back at this again in the spring.

crbsls.org

Today is Sunday and I’ve had at least two e-mails and one phone call to let me know that our SLS website is not working. Maintaining an up-to-date website with lots of important information for school librarians is an important part of the job. In my BOCES, I work closely with the Northeast Regional Information Center (NERIC) as they host, back-up and otherwise troubleshoot my site. I also work closely with a local library consultant <a href="http://www.pafa.net"> Polly Farrington</a> to get help adding content and maintaining the design. So this Sunday afternoon I’m sending off e-mails to all of my support folks to get that site back up ASAP.

BUY Cialis