Here we are at another beautiful building. This is the Otesaga Resort and Conference Center on Otego Lake in Cooperstown, NY. Every year, all of the School Library System directors meet here for a three day conference.

It is a great opportunity for sharing ideas and information, as well as resolving issue that we are all facing. Some of the topics we discussed this year included: cooperative purchasing of an online resource for all of our schools, managing online database purchasing, consolidation of a statewide information fluency curriculum and school library advocacy.

With all of the work we accomplished in our time here, we did have some short breaks when we could take walks downtown or around the grounds of the Otesaga. Some people caught an early morning swim in the heated pool and everyone enjoyed the delicious meals. But don’t be deceived by the beauty of it all, Otesaga week means WORK!
Luckily, it is all done in this beautiful setting.

On this beautiful May afternoon, I attended a meeting of the Regents Advisory Council on Libraries here at the Education Department Building in Albany. Several of the Regents and Commissioner Mills were in attendance.

In this meeting the Regents were brought up to date on critical issues in libraries – including the need to require certified school media specialists in elementary schools. They asked questions and responded to a presentation by Fran Roscello.

One of the perks of this job is that many of our meetings are in really beautiful buildings. The NYSED Building boasts 36 Corintian columns, one of the longest colonnades in the United States.

Today I was at the Hamagrael Elementary School in Bethlehem visiting the new librarian there, Pam Held. Pam and her principal are determined to build a strong program. Pam has lots of energy and a solid understanding of inquiry based learning and information literacy skills. Teachers here are already begining to work with Pam in her first year on the job.
Darn, I forgot to take a picture

Part of the job is advocating for school libraries and School Library Systems at the legislative level. These critical decision makers need to know how important strong library programs are for kids. They need to understand that future citizens and voters are sitting in classrooms and school libraries today – learning how to make good decisions, how to analyze and synthesize information, how to be citizens of a participatory democracy.

If you take a look at the Capital Region BOCES Information Fluency Curriculum, you can’t help but be aware of how critical it is to have a strong and dynamic school library program with a qualified SLMS as part of a child’s whole education.
Too often legislators, like school administrators, see the school library program in the narrow focus of the school from which they graduated. Advocacy helps to turn this image around. It is a process of education for them.

Here I am at the Capitol Building, outside the office of Senator Neil Breslin on February 22, 2007. While our schools were closed for winter break, I took the opportunity to visit the Senator at a time when the Capitol was fairly quiet. We had a very positive meeting with the senator, who is a supporter of libraries.

If we are successful in our efforts, students all across the state become the unknowing beneficiaries of our work. It’s really powerful!

Last year I was elected to a 3 year term as a NYLA Councilor at Large. NYLA Council meets in Albany several times a year. Here I am with Rachel Baum, our current NYLA president. We took a quick minute to sit for this photo before the Winter meeting.

NYLA speaks for the whole library community with our legislature and other elected officials. It is such a great experience to be a part of this organization and to work closely with librarians from ALL types of libraries with a common purpose. The biggest job of NYLA is advocacy for financial and legislative support for libraries across New York State. We’ve had some real successes these past few years, even during difficult budget times.

Everyone across the state who believes in the power and positive impact of a library on a community or an individual should belong to this pro-active organization.
http://www.nyla.org

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!

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!

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.

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.

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?