{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/959c53gs5v/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Community-Led Collection Development"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/166/original/LYRASIS_Learning.png?1631557479","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Instructor"]},"value":{"en":["Jain Orr"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003es a public high school librarian with a small budget, Jain Orr was determined to spend her limited funds on books that actually piqued the interest of her diverse teen population. How do you buy books that actually get checked out? What books spark joy? Jain developed a toolbox of \"community-led collection development\" strategies to ensure that her library holdings reflected the material that her population wanted. This session will describe practices that can be implemented immediately to make \"community-led\" your primary form of library acquisition, no matter what kind of library you work in. With time and fidelity, these strategies develop a culture of community library input where the service population guides collection development and library staff act as facilitators (not experts).\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eLearning Outcomes\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eBy the end of this class, students will be able to:\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003edescribe the benefits of community-led collection development.\u003cbr\u003elist and employ indirect data collection strategies.\u003cbr\u003earticulate the material (or infrastructural) conditions where community-led collection development can begin immediately and grow into a taken-for-granted mode of library practice.\u003cbr\u003eInstructor\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eJain Orr spent 5 years as a high school librarian in Austin ISD and has a background in grassroots activism, community development and ethnographic research. Currently, she is a first-year doctoral student at the University of Texas interested in the impact of school librarianship, particularly at the secondary level.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2025-02-04"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003es a public high school librarian with a small budget, Jain Orr was determined to spend her limited funds on books that actually piqued the interest of her diverse teen population. How do you buy books that actually get checked out? What books spark joy? Jain developed a toolbox of \"community-led collection development\" strategies to ensure that her library holdings reflected the material that her population wanted. This session will describe practices that can be implemented immediately to make \"community-led\" your primary form of library acquisition, no matter what kind of library you work in. With time and fidelity, these strategies develop a culture of community library input where the service population guides collection development and library staff act as facilitators (not experts).\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eLearning Outcomes\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eBy the end of this class, students will be able to:\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003edescribe the benefits of community-led collection development.\u003cbr /\u003elist and employ indirect data collection strategies.\u003cbr /\u003earticulate the material (or infrastructural) conditions where community-led collection development can begin immediately and grow into a taken-for-granted mode of library practice.\u003cbr /\u003eInstructor\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eJain Orr spent 5 years as a high school librarian in Austin ISD and has a background in grassroots activism, community development and ethnographic research. Currently, she is a first-year doctoral student at the University of Texas interested in the impact of school librarianship, particularly at the secondary level.\u003c/p\u003e"]},"provider":[{"id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["LYRASIS"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["LYRASIS"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/166/original/LYRASIS_Learning.png?1631557479","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/262/033/small/video1190773488.mp4_1738762244.jpg?1738762247","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3596/collection_resources/141641/file/262033","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - video1190773488.mp4"]},"duration":3174.88,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/262/033/small/video1190773488.mp4_1738762244.jpg?1738762247","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3596/collection_resources/141641/file/262033/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3596/collection_resources/141641/file/262033/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-lyrasis.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/262/033/original/video1190773488.mp4?1738762243","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":3174.88,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3596/collection_resources/141641/file/262033","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3596/collection_resources/141641/file/262033/transcript/75657","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3596/collection_resources/141641/file/262033/transcript/75657/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"15:00:30 Hello, everyone. My name is Katie Kletlinger. I am in charge of the consulting program at Lyricist and I am here today to do some general housekeeping and to introduce our speaker for today, Jane Orr.\r\n15:00:43 First, to let everyone know, we do have tech support in Shania. She just put her information into the chat.\r\n15:00:51 She is an absolute pleasure to work with. So if you have any questions throughout this presentation feel free to call her or to type into the chat and talk with her and she will be able to assist you.\r\n15:01:04 Also, throughout the presentation, we do have the chat. So you are able to put questions in there and there will be more than likely questions at the end. So you'll have time to do that as well. And Jane is raising her head up and down. So yes.\r\n15:01:18 You'll have plenty of time to do that and we will make sure to answer any questions that you have.\r\n15:01:23 Also, at the conclusion of this presentation, you will receive a copy of the slides and the recording. So if there are some things that you couldn't take notes on that you wanted to, never fear, you're going to receive all of this information.\r\n15:01:38 Over the next few days. And before we get started, I'm going to officially introduce our speaker for today.\r\n15:01:47 So Jane Orr has spent five years as a high school librarian in Austin and has a background in grassroots activism, community development, and ethnographic research.\r\n15:01:58 Currently, she is a first year doctoral student at the University of Texas and is interested in the impact of school librarianship, particularly at the secondary level.\r\n15:02:09 Take it away, Jane, and thanks so much for being with us today.\r\n15:02:14 Awesome. Thanks, Katie. That was great because that kind of covered one of my slides. Super convenient because i yeah i think my… Hi, y'all, I'm Jane. Born and raised Austinite, former Austin ISD.\r\n15:02:30 School librarian. Yeah, my background really influenced a lot of how I approached school librarianship.\r\n15:02:39 I learned pretty quickly that i learned pretty quickly Most of my school librarian colleagues mostly had teaching backgrounds. And so I was able to see that Some of the things I was doing and coming up with were very rooted in my own story, my own history, background doing activism, especially feminist\r\n15:02:58 Mostly and um I had the opportunity to do some work in Southern Africa. So I really loved cultural anthropology and in particular the ethnographic method, which is really all about immersing yourself in the research community and the research question and the research question and\r\n15:03:18 I over time kind of learned that I love research I love teenagers. I love activism and uh High school librarianship became this like dream that I wanted. And I took years of school and I was able to finally make it to my\r\n15:03:39 My destination village, which was McCallum High School. It's a public school in Austin ISD. I had last year.\r\n15:03:49 1,840 students and 124 staff members for whom I considered I'm your librarian And this village was sort of like kind of a perfect place to explore some of those ideas of doing research and community-led collection development.\r\n15:04:13 So this might give some of y'all whiplash, but I'm really influenced by philosophy. And in particular, when I was going through kind of my early years as a librarian i was really into laozi.\r\n15:04:28 Who is the author of the Tao De Jing. Hopefully y'all all have that in your library. Basically.\r\n15:04:36 600 BC, Lao Tzu, we think, was an archivist. So I think we get to claim him as a librarian He was asked, according to legend, to write a book about governance and being a good leader.\r\n15:04:53 And he came up with this book called The Book of the Way is how it's often translated, that kind of describes leadership in one of the most non-authoritarian ways that you can imagine. In fact, a lot of anarchists cite him as one of their early\r\n15:05:09 Thinkers because thinkers because It's about leading without leading. So if you're familiar with the philosophy, I think this will be extra sticky for you. But if not, I want you to kind of keep in mind that This idea of leading by not leading, it's sort of a theme that you'll see throughout this whole presentation on collection development.\r\n15:05:32 Because I think running a library is very much like being a leader, right? Deciding what goes in the collection, what stays.\r\n15:05:41 What's removed is very much, these are very much leadership decisions, right?\r\n15:05:48 And so one of my favorite quotes from the Tao De Jing, and it will be no surprise that this guy was a librarian.\r\n15:05:54 Is to attain knowledge, add things every day to attain wisdom, remove things every day.\r\n15:06:01 And this has been my email signature for years. It won't surprise you given it.\r\n15:06:08 The whole breadth of collection development. So I'm going to break up my whole presentation into three parts. The first being weeding.\r\n15:06:18 The second donations and the third purchasing. And I'm really interested in this weeding part i think I know for myself, like when i first heard the phrase collection development, I was only thinking about building And I never learned how to weed during library school. It was something that I kind of figured out on the job.\r\n15:06:43 So I hope if you came for that last purchasing one that you're not super disappointed. It'll all make sense. And I think it forms a cohesive ecosystem of movement.\r\n15:06:59 So a little bit about me, my personal kind of story plays into this a little bit more.\r\n15:07:07 I had spent my first year at McCallum High School Library as the assistant. So there was the head librarian and I got to work with her, she was named Jane. So we were both the Janes and that was really fun.\r\n15:07:21 Um and Then COVID hit. The second year it was everything was remote. I was working outside. The third year I was on my own with a really huge library collection.\r\n15:07:33 And my… my partner and I were just going like starting a separation. So I had moved out of a four bedroom suburban home And had just transitioned to a one bedroom apartment with my son.\r\n15:07:51 And it was a shock. You accumulate a lot of stuff when you have four bedrooms to fill and then you cut that in half and it's still more stuff than can fit into a one bedroom apartment with two people. So I didn't have pictures of the giant mountain of stuff that was in my living room.\r\n15:08:11 When this happened. But I basically, I just told the movers like put everything in the living room. I need one place of peace.\r\n15:08:18 And non-chaos of my life getting like completely upended, right? So my son and I slept minimally in what is now his bedroom.\r\n15:08:29 On these mats in this room that I'm now in was full with stuff that I now had to sift through.\r\n15:08:38 And it was overwhelming to say the least. I had watched the Netflix series of the Marie Kondo one, but I had never read the book.\r\n15:08:49 And when I was faced with this mountain of stuff, I picked up the book and it ended up blowing my mind and blowing my mind coincided with me like weeding the library where I worked. And so a lot of the philosophies, like where I first picked up the book to help me with my personal life.\r\n15:09:08 It ended up making weeding so easy. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that and how those two overlap.\r\n15:09:16 So the most important takeaway, if I had to distill it from Marie Kondo's amazing life-changing magic of tidying up and how it applies to weeding is this idea is that you shouldn't decide what to get rid of. You should decide what to keep.\r\n15:09:46 In all of it, which can make decision making really hard.\r\n15:09:52 So instead of looking at a shelf, maybe just one shelf of like 20 books And picking up one and saying, should I remove this book? Should I take this book out and discard it?\r\n15:10:03 The right question to ask, according to Marie Kondo and me.\r\n15:10:08 Is to look at this big shelf of books and say, what must stay?\r\n15:10:12 And that's a way easier question to answer. If I can look at 20 books and ask myself what must remain?\r\n15:10:20 That's a little bit, that's actually that's a lot easier. I can quickly pull out 10 books and say, there's no way these books are leaving. And now I'm only looking at that last 10.\r\n15:10:34 So if you've read the book or watched the show, you know she talks a lot about sparking joy. She says it's like a zinc.\r\n15:10:42 Like a feeling that it's just like… Right. So this can be a little weird. It's easier to do this with your personal stuff versus being the person who's doing it on behalf of a community of 2,000 people right so\r\n15:10:59 How do I know if it sparks joy in my population?\r\n15:11:03 And the way that I operationalized that was the last checkout.\r\n15:11:09 So if I say I'm reading my nonfiction, it's got 10 years And if it hasn't been checked out in 10 years, it had its time. It's time to go.\r\n15:11:21 That would be like my framework so If you think about a teenager seeing a book picking it up, opening it.\r\n15:11:32 Deciding to themselves, I like this enough that I'm going to take it over to a calendar and interact with an adult who will then put an obligation on me that I promise that I will return this book They're putting it in their backpack and they're taking it home and they're\r\n15:11:51 Promising to come and bring it back right so If that isn't sparking joy, if that book isn't sparking joy in a teenager, I don't know what is. So I use that last checkout as my kind of like symbol for like a spark of joy\r\n15:12:09 And doing this, I was able to, in three years, go from 28,000 books to 8,000.\r\n15:12:18 And really remove a lot of extra shelves and squish. I basically, yeah, I became the master at weeding.\r\n15:12:26 By going through this process. And… The first stop after I have decided that a book should not remain, you know, it wasn't one of the chosen ones, right? It wasn't a must stay and it didn't spark joy in anybody that I\r\n15:12:42 That I could tell, it would go to my free book cart, which was just this regular installation just outside the library doors so I got better at the free book cart as time went on. I would usually put smaller amounts in than you see in the picture.\r\n15:12:59 On the left. About a third to half of the books would dissipate into the community from the free book cart. And the way I saw it was that those funds that bought those books were earmarked for the students at this campus and the community here.\r\n15:13:17 If it leaves off the free book cart, that is the money being well spent.\r\n15:13:26 And for the books that didn't leave the free book cart, they didn't spark joy.\r\n15:13:33 I had a couple of sources that I cultivated. One was the top right icon is from Inside Books Project, which is an organization in Austin that collects books and sends them to people who are incarcerated and then uh Over time, I like friend of a friend met somebody, the guy on the left, his name's francis\r\n15:13:58 He's gone in and he spends his own money and his free time Filling shipping containers with books in rural texas And sending the books back home to Ghana. And he's actually the largest book provider in Ghana. It's just this guy doing this for the love of it. So this is a picture he shared with me, the kids saying a reader today, a leader tomorrow.\r\n15:14:26 And so I just… I say this to say like, I got really good at rehoming books, finding new homes for books. And I think this is a critical bottleneck for a lot of people when it comes to collection development.\r\n15:14:42 I got so good. I deem myself the discard queen of Austin ISD.\r\n15:14:49 That I was able to offer my book, Rehoming Pipeline to everyone in our district.\r\n15:14:56 And I was getting just boxes and boxes of books It essentially revealed that our district didn't have a good way to help librarians remove books. So it was kind of everybody, every librarian for themselves.\r\n15:15:10 And coming up with this pipeline It made getting rid of books, removing books from the collection a lot easier.\r\n15:15:21 So I think that cultivating that emptiness is important Something that I didn't realize would be a controversial topic was the extent to which I could take donations. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that.\r\n15:15:37 But I do think that receiving donations is is an example of community-led collection development because these are items that are coming directly from the community. In many cases, someone in the community has spent money on it.\r\n15:15:52 And then maybe they've just outgrown the book and they're ready to pass it on to the next person.\r\n15:15:58 So we get a lot of, there are a lot of strong feelings about this in the library community. I'm very much in the give me your books camp. Again, I'm able to because of that. I was able to because of that pipeline that I had established that made made it easy to move things. Or I sort of imagined it as like a churn\r\n15:16:21 I included this slide here. This is a picture of me from I can't believe it. It's been two weeks ago. I took the Buddhist precepts, which is at my temple. I spent a year formally studying the Buddhist precepts. And three years before that.\r\n15:16:38 Being a member of my temple. I'm also the librarian at my temple. So that's me in the library.\r\n15:16:44 And I included this because this part about donations really reminds me of something In particularly the Zen Buddhist tradition, which is about emptiness. Emptiness is like a core tenet of Zen Buddhism.\r\n15:17:00 And one of my favorite quotes from from the Zen guy, the Japanese guy who brought Zen to the United States, Shinrus Suzuki Roshi says, in the beginner's mind There are many possibilities. In the experts, there are few.\r\n15:17:17 And so he talks a lot about cultivating that beginner's mind and staying in a place of not knowing because it creates a lot of opportunities.\r\n15:17:26 And the way I see this relating to donations was my ability to withstand emptiness, which I learned was stronger than other people's. So this is not a picture of the library I work. This is just a picture from like\r\n15:17:43 Book banning in Florida. But I will say that I was doing my major weed at the same time that the book banning stuff was really flaring up.\r\n15:17:54 And my shelves, I didn't take pictures of them, but they looked like this. They were completely empty in some cases. Like I I squished everything to be kind of in one area and that left me with swaths of empty shelves that I had no plan for.\r\n15:18:14 In fact, my boss, who was always very like hands off, not micromanaging, not a micromanaging bone in her body was like, it was the only time she was like.\r\n15:18:26 You can't do that, Jane. You have to have something on the shelves.\r\n15:18:31 And I was like, okay, you know, and I can still remember the the moment when it hit me of what to do with this particularly large chunk of empty shelves.\r\n15:18:44 Was that I would build a maker space and I had in other projects been helping around the school clean out closets and my own back rooms that I really had never hadn't been touched in decades, partly because I had gotten there like around COVID, right?\r\n15:19:04 And finding just finding tons of school supplies and construction paper and pens and stamp pads and die cut machine, just all kinds of goodies and bobs and bits um just spread not only around the library and the back rooms of the library, but really the whole campus had these like pockets of materials.\r\n15:19:27 And to go back to Marie Kondo, one of her rules is that you should never scatter storage, right? You shouldn't put like scissors all over the house, right? You should have like a scissor drawer.\r\n15:19:42 Applying the KonMari method here, I just said, we're going to look for everything that is remotely like office supplies, craft supplies, art supplies.\r\n15:19:53 Not only in this library, but in this campus, and we're going to put it in one place where everybody can access it, not just teachers.\r\n15:20:01 But students and staff and anybody who works and wants and needs it can can get it. So I think cultivating that empty space made acting on this idea possible and made it made me able to do it instantly. And my assistant at the time still\r\n15:20:21 Remembers fondly the morning that I came into work and I was like, we're building a maker space because it was really that sudden.\r\n15:20:31 Another swath of shelves that I left empty were these lower ones. I hated these shelves so much.\r\n15:20:39 If I was looking for a book in this section, which at the time it was the 300s and the Dewey, so that's like the culture and politics stuff. That's the stuff, the meaty stuff that teenagers are into.\r\n15:20:51 It was on these shelves. And if I were looking or reshelving, I would do this like bobbing motion with my head. And I was like The last time I almost faint trying to look for books on the show.\r\n15:21:06 So in my big weed, I left these completely blank. And then when, if you think back to when I was asking for discards or letting other people know they could send me their discards.\r\n15:21:16 I was able to fill these shelves with ones from elementary schools.\r\n15:21:22 Thinking like I was mostly in like a somewhat selfish mentality maybe that like I had, I think at the time my son was four, I had a four-year-old, I have a 40 hour a week job. I'm a single mom like\r\n15:21:34 I'm a librarian and even I do not have time to go to the library for this kid.\r\n15:21:41 The high school library where I worked only had about 20 picture books and I can see from a purchasing standpoint why it wouldn't make sense to invest a lot of money in that if they're free and they're there and your threshold for quality is maybe lower than what an elementary schools is.\r\n15:22:05 Then I was able to build a massive picture book collection relatively overnight. I didn't have a barrier. I didn't have to clear space for it.\r\n15:22:15 The space was ready and available for me to basically act on opportunities really quickly.\r\n15:22:21 It turned out that the biggest users of these books were our life skills students. And that's something that I hadn't anticipated, but it was really heartwarming when I was able to start doing like a monthly class visit for the life skills students to come in. And they really would sit in front of these books and take their time. And they had lots of options and that wasn't the case before.\r\n15:22:49 So again, the theme of acting on being able to act on opportunities because you have room. And I know I've heard a similar concept applied in like work-life balance conversations about not filling your schedule to the top, right?\r\n15:23:06 Because it means you have to say no to every other opportunity that comes. So this image on the left, the art books, this was really cool. Somebody who was Just literally lived in the neighborhood, retired architect. He used to design hotels.\r\n15:23:23 All over the world. I guess it was his hobby to when he would travel to all the different continents would buy these big gorgeous architecture and art books.\r\n15:23:35 The kinds that cost like $200 that most small budget librarians would never dream of spending money that kind of money on.\r\n15:23:45 Especially a book that's not going to get checked out because it's not going to go in that backpack, right? It's not going to spark that much joy.\r\n15:23:54 But these were free, right? So not spending money on things that um aren't going to get checked out.\r\n15:24:03 The architect had originally reached out to the HBCU in Austin, Houston Tillotson university And asked if they wanted the books.\r\n15:24:13 But the librarian there who had also kind of like similar to me just taken over was undergoing a massive weeding effort and it was like, I can't like we are we are too full right now. I can't take any of those books.\r\n15:24:26 And so we basically got all of them and they're They were breathtakingly beautiful books.\r\n15:24:35 Another thing I've done, again, getting donations from the community is it's something I presented on at LibLearnX is using restorative justice in the library.\r\n15:24:47 And so, of course, we never find kids for returning books late but um normally at the end of senior year, the seniors would come and they'd have to get me to sign off that they didn't have any library obligations. So this would be my big like\r\n15:25:06 Reaping, I would say my big harvest of missing books. Usually it was kids Like, first of all, the kids who lose books are the kids who read like so we'll just start there.\r\n15:25:18 And a lot of times they would be like, I have no idea where it's at um Do you want me to pay for it? And my… a lot of times I look at what the book was and how old it was. And I was just, well, could you just\r\n15:25:34 Maybe go home, talk to your parents And bring me something nice to replace it. So there's that element of accountability that's really important with restorative justice. It's not a pass.\r\n15:25:47 But it's also not punishment, right? A lot of the students that I served, some of them were refugees who were new to the country, but most of them were from affluent families. And even if you can just sort of throw money at a problem and make it go away.\r\n15:26:08 It still feels like a punishment, right? Like it still doesn't feel good And those affluent kids are probably going to be like, I'm just going to buy books from now on because I don't want to deal with fines or that obligation.\r\n15:26:21 I definitely don't want to… My parting message out to teenagers in the world is don't use the library.\r\n15:26:28 You know make you feel bad. So this was a method I developed that was honestly easier for me on a like but from a bookkeeping standpoint And it also reaped a lot of awesome books straight from the community so um\r\n15:26:46 If you were to take the stack of books that like were lost and then the stack of books that I got as replacements, you would much rather take that replacement stack. So that was another way that I you know that the community helped me build the collection.\r\n15:27:06 And I just became really good at hustling. I was always my kind of tagline is I'm always taking donations.\r\n15:27:14 Of books, crafts, and other stuff.\r\n15:27:22 And that churn, I could just put all donations into this churn that was already moving. So like when I when I was cleaning out the Buddhist library, there were just huge chunks of either like stacks of magazines. Obviously, I'm not going to add those to the collection, but they left that free book cart. So taking donations\r\n15:27:45 Was really low stakes.\r\n15:27:50 So, oh, yay, I'm doing good with time. Okay, so the third part of the, you know, maybe the part that I probably would have just thought of when I think of collection development is purchasing.\r\n15:28:01 I actually did have a pretty good budget for being a public school in Texas. In fact, I often had a hard time spending the money that I had and Consulting the community was important to me.\r\n15:28:19 So here's this quote, Epictetus. We're in the West now, one of the famous Stoic philosophers.\r\n15:28:28 He says it's impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.\r\n15:28:34 And I put this in here to remind me to talk about like the extreme imposter syndrome that I was struggling with.\r\n15:28:42 When I took over the school library so um As I mentioned, my background was in activism and cultural anthropology, research.\r\n15:28:53 You have me teach a lesson on how to do citation and college level research like i will I will soar. That's my bag. That's what I'm into.\r\n15:29:04 Getting science and social studies and all the different disciplines in to talk about research and their context, like I was awesome at.\r\n15:29:12 When the English classes came in and asked me what book they should read.\r\n15:29:18 Talking about fiction books, I would freeze because I don't like young adult fiction. In fact, I feel like I'm allergic to it. I was like trying to read one for like an activity and I just I was like, I'm sorry y'all, this is torture\r\n15:29:38 It's just not my thing. And it gave me major imposter syndrome that kind of like the one seemingly the one value add that a librarian should have to give good readers advisory for fiction, it was really the skill that I was lacking the most in.\r\n15:29:56 And I kind of had to approach everything in this realm as a research question.\r\n15:30:04 There's that wondrous beauty of the beginner's mind showing up so My question was, what does my community want to read and uh You know, I would get publishers calling me wanting to send me catalogs. I would get you know stuff\r\n15:30:22 You know kind of like unsolicited stuff from companies When I look to my district for guidance on purchasing, it was really You know, they were recommending stuff maybe from YALSA like But if you know, if you're familiar with these spaces\r\n15:30:44 The publishing companies and the librarians and the generation of these lists, there's a lot of money going on behind it and And really, there are just so many books out there that me being the person to pick them It just felt like a lot.\r\n15:31:01 And I think having gone through the weed that I did where it was book after book, $20, $17, $28.\r\n15:31:12 Of books that had never been checked out It really scared me. I was really like the responsibility and the stewardship to spend the funds in a way that would guarantee that the book would be used. And so I had this rather unrealistic goal that I still think is a good goal to have.\r\n15:31:34 Which is I want every single book I buy to get checked out.\r\n15:31:38 Every single book. Obviously, that's really It's not going to happen, but it was my goal. And I think it's a good and healthy goal to operate with.\r\n15:31:49 So one of the first things i did was to i had like a suggestion box and I had surveys everywhere. I distributed them on flyers. I distributed like my survey like electronically.\r\n15:32:05 But I got to say, they didn't yield very much. And I don't know if anyone's had this experience of trying to get recommendations and then finding that it didn't like wasn't going anywhere Even when I could get them logistically, it was just like not.\r\n15:32:23 Not working out so the way I was taught to kind of do purchasing was to sit down with the number of my budget In like Follett or one of the other companies and like kind of build a shopping cart and then like\r\n15:32:39 Kind of make the purchase usually like a big most of it in one go in one shot.\r\n15:32:47 When it when it was sort of like time for me to do that i would look like the very few recommendations that I got was definitely not very many.\r\n15:32:56 You know, may have been given to me like a month ago And then I order the books.\r\n15:33:03 And a month later they arrive and they arrive I have no idea, or it certainly wasn't easy logistically at that point to sort of figure out who asked for what, if I even had collected that information.\r\n15:33:17 And try to get the book to them. So it was just like, oh, that was That was weird.\r\n15:33:25 And recently I had kind of an experience on the other end. I think it must have been over the summer.\r\n15:33:32 This past summer, I really, really wanted a book. I guess I didn't want to pay for it And I looked at Austin Public Library to see if they had it. And when they didn't, I don't even remember the book, which is funny. I had this like intense feeling of like.\r\n15:33:50 Indignation and outrage that they didn't have this book that I thought they should have.\r\n15:33:55 Enough so that I found the way to give a recommendation to APL, like you should buy this book But it was really like, okay, you have submitted your request.\r\n15:34:09 There was no, we'll let you know about our decision in a few days.\r\n15:34:13 There was no like do you want the book if it comes in there like it was all sort of like this slide, like shouting into a void And it doesn't encourage future shouting, even if there is a librarian down in that valley who like was like, okay, I heard that right\r\n15:34:34 Um so i think This appears to be probably the most common strategy by very limited sample size.\r\n15:34:43 Are these sort of that are like mediated by technology you know there's like zero human interaction or follow up or follow through, right?\r\n15:34:56 So I remember one day I was… I think the library was being used for testing. So I had moved library operations into the hallway as I did. And that's um always That's always a fun experience because I see a different side of the school when I do that.\r\n15:35:14 I remember sitting outside the library and I had just weeded the music section and it was I was in desperate need of like some better titles to add. This is a high school that focuses on the fine arts, by the way. So like, oh, embarrassing\r\n15:35:29 So I just started writing down band t-shirt names um I've had pushback on this particular strategy because people are like, oh, the teenagers, they just wear shirts.\r\n15:35:43 Um because you know it looks cool or whatever they don't know the band. And so I think that might be a cultural difference because in Austin, if you don't If you're wearing a pink Floyd shirt and you aren't ready to talk about Pink Floyd, like that is like social humiliation. So I felt like this was a good strategy.\r\n15:36:02 And I just noticed like, what are the repeats It was hard to get teenagers to kind of tell me directly what they wanted to read, but they were actually communicating what they were interested in all of the time, like with their clothing. And so one of the ways that I figured to build that music section was to\r\n15:36:24 Look at their t-shirts.\r\n15:36:30 I also had this idea. That it's similar, I think, in the sense of the shouting into the void of like getting teachers to tell me like books that changed their life.\r\n15:36:40 Telling them if we don't have it, I'll add it to the collection. That way you know if you're interacting with the student one-on-one that like you can recommend that book to them and say with confidence that the library bought it.\r\n15:36:58 Ooh, this is one of my favorite ideas that I came up with. I stopped doing ILLs.\r\n15:37:05 It was really slow to do interlibrary loans in our district. It could take up to two weeks if you didn't sort of like time yourself on the route properly, which I never seemed to be able to totally master.\r\n15:37:20 And I realized also that i realized also This was my community. This was the book recommendation list, right? This is what I was actually asking for is They want a book. I don't have it. This is actually should be my buying list. This is what I should buy are the books that my people are asking for and that I don't already have\r\n15:37:41 And not to be competitive, but if I were competitive, which I am a little bit.\r\n15:37:46 I say, I'm going to get that check out. I'm not going to give it to one of my colleagues.\r\n15:37:51 I want to be the one with the moving and shaking collection.\r\n15:37:59 Another idea that I implemented, which is one of my favorites, is the no log. And I have to give this idea credit to The director of the San Marcos Public Library. She had all of her all of her librarians, if somebody asks for something, it didn't have to be a book. If they ask for something.\r\n15:38:20 And the librarian's answer was no. They had to write it down in the no log. And so I started keeping a no log of, do you have this? And I would say, no.\r\n15:38:32 But that no log gave me a list of kind of like the gap, right? The gap in what my community expected me to have And what I was able to deliver. And it was almost like I could turn the no log into a shopping list.\r\n15:38:49 So where it all kind of came together and the thing that sort of brought me to lyricist to give this presentation was a combination of like a no log and the whole class checkout.\r\n15:39:02 So frequently, the English teachers bring their kids to the library to check out books.\r\n15:39:07 This is where I would get the most like entries into the no log, right? I'm suddenly inundated with 30 students who are asking for, do you have this? Do you have this? Do you So rather than saying no or doing an interlibrary loan, I just started immediately having students fill out this materials request form. That's what I would call it.\r\n15:39:32 Give me the title, give me the author, your name and your student ID number and um I would say, no, I don't have it, but can you wait a week was like my tagline because that was the amount of time it could take me to\r\n15:39:45 Buy a book, process it, and get it checked out and sent to them. And this was a real game changer.\r\n15:39:52 In terms of like culture and building a reputation, I would say.\r\n15:39:59 So the request would come in, I would get that request.\r\n15:40:04 I would purchase the book usually at the end of the day after I had like gotten a bunch of requests from maybe a whole class checkout.\r\n15:40:12 Process the book once it comes in. I would… wrap the book like a present.\r\n15:40:21 At first wrapping it became was like to maintain privacy, right? You don't need to advertise to everybody But, you know, I'm already like making it pretty. So put a bow on it say two To Jonathan. Love the library. The library loves you.\r\n15:40:41 And usually I'd want it kind of like, okay, done, you know, on to the next thing. So I'd have an office aide come and pick up the book from the library and then deliver it to that student in their class.\r\n15:40:52 And I think if you think about this from the student's point of view, it's like.\r\n15:40:57 You went to the library in English class last Friday. You're now in biology class. You've completely forgotten that you've filled out that materials request form, you know, it's like in your rear view All of the sudden, somebody knocks on the door\r\n15:41:14 The teacher is handed a present And they say like, Jonathan? And then Jonathan's like, what?\r\n15:41:21 And hand Jonathan a present. It says to Jonathan from library And they unwrap it and they're like, you know.\r\n15:41:32 And the reason I love this is that teenagers don't listen to adults. It's just a fact of life. It's normal for them developmentally.\r\n15:41:43 Working with them and serving them is fun and interesting and complicated. And I think this is this This is one of the most crystallizing like examples of that.\r\n15:41:56 Is that having a teen be the person to say the librarian will buy books for you is a thousand times more impactful than me saying I will buy books for you.\r\n15:42:11 And so having teenagers tell other teenagers, yes, the librarian will buy that for you and having this sort of like instant evidence of that that's like sudden, it's positive reinforcement It's checking a lot of boxes in terms of like best practices for getting the word out with teenagers.\r\n15:42:37 This to me was my ideal scenario. I did everything analog, so I know it'll be a little different if you have more automated systems, but Oftentimes, very often I would see this, that a student had requested a book Ideally, I immediately check it out to them and then it just keeps circulating because they're recommending it to their friends. They're seeing other people read it.\r\n15:43:03 It's somehow in their cultural atmosphere in ways that I don't have access to. And so using teenagers as my informants to use an anthropological word.\r\n15:43:14 Building rapport with a couple, it really is all you need because then they can be your advocates for you.\r\n15:43:24 And so what I think this speaks to, and this connects a lot with Lao Tzu.\r\n15:43:29 Is this idea of top-down versus bottom up and I was not really, I wasn't comfortable being on the top I really believe in kind of, you know, doing as much as I could to lead from behind and take the lead from my community.\r\n15:43:47 Including myself in that. And so I'm I'm curious and maybe it'll come out in the questions section about just like your experience with trying some of these methods. And what I've noticed is that when i ask um Like the other day I had lunch with an academic librarian at UT and I asked them about collection development\r\n15:44:12 And he just, he really didn't know how it worked and i I wonder about that chain of communication from the ground level to the person on top.\r\n15:44:24 And is the person like on top? Because theoretically I am that top person in the high school library.\r\n15:44:31 Are they able to to hear the voices that are coming from below and where are they getting their information, right? So are you getting it from from national organizations or are you getting it from corporations? Are you getting it from recommender algorithms like where are you getting the information\r\n15:44:51 To buy for your micro community. Are you getting it from outside world or are you getting it from them? And so me trying to like\r\n15:45:04 Wretch titles out of teenagers. I hope that um you know My experience, my sort of failures too with all of it can help inform other people's experiences.\r\n15:45:18 Let's see. I wanted to include a little bell hooks.\r\n15:45:24 Being oppressed means the absence of choices. I think ironically, I found myself sort of seeing the perspective of the book banners, which is funny As a librarian who was like.\r\n15:45:40 Very anti-censorship in all of the ways. It couldn't be more. I'm like radically anti-censorship. So let me preface it by saying that. But I see the point. I see that there is power being exercised here.\r\n15:45:53 And I have seen that it is not always wielded responsibly.\r\n15:45:58 And to me, being someone who was very afraid of being kind of outed and or attacked or criticized.\r\n15:46:08 As a librarian, I felt that community-led collection development shielded me from that because I could say.\r\n15:46:15 I'm just buying what the students asked for and I can prove it.\r\n15:46:19 And that was my whole philosophy was that it actually wasn't this like expert making decisions It was an expert managing the space and um doing, you know, the will of the people If for no other reason.\r\n15:46:38 Cya community led. So thank you for listening. And I look forward to any questions you guys may have for me.\r\n15:47:14 So far, I'm not seeing any questions, which makes me suspect you probably did a fantastic job and answered everything. So it would not surprise me. But what we'll do is stay on for one or two minutes in case anyone else does have questions.\r\n15:47:28 So everyone, thank you so much for attending today. And Jane, thank you. You taught me so much. I really appreciated your time.\r\n15:47:36 Yay. Thank you.\r\n15:47:56 I had this um these moments of doubt right before this presentation that my case was so particular.\r\n15:48:09 And so kind of rooted in in high school librarianship but i actually then i was like no That's beauty.\r\n15:48:21 Yeah, I doubt that's the case because you do have a question. So people were very intrigued. So I'm going to read it out loud.\r\n15:48:27 Okay.\r\n15:48:27 It is from Kieran. Do you have any plans about how to combat questions about whether your students are mature enough to be the ones driving collection development.\r\n15:48:41 Yeah, I think what I would say is that They know their own mind better than I do.\r\n15:48:48 And I'm very much in the camp of student choice leading the way. And sometimes this put me at odds with my English teacher colleagues who would Try to discourage graphic novels or manga or even like sometimes students high school students wanted to read\r\n15:49:06 Goosebumps or Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Maybe for like nostalgic reasons. And I just think like the heart knows what it wants and And that that is the best way to cultivate a love of reading and learning.\r\n15:49:20 Great. And now we have another question from Katie. She first wanted to say thank you. She said, I had to step away for just a moment when you were discussing censorship. So my apologies if this was already said.\r\n15:49:33 Have you ever had a student request a title that you didn't think was right for your collection?\r\n15:49:38 What did you do?\r\n15:49:43 Yeah, that's it.\r\n15:49:41 Wow. I did. It was a book by the Marquis de Sade.\r\n15:49:52 So I went… so far as to actually buy the book.\r\n15:49:59 Again, coming from a very radically anti-censorship perspective. I went as far as purchasing the book When I looked at it, I had this like wash of fear\r\n15:50:15 Not for the well-being of the student. I think he could totally have handled it, would have loved it. I would have seen no problem with him spending his own money to engage with those topics, which are like fetish.\r\n15:50:32 Sex stuff. I think it's really healthy for a teenager to be exploring that. The fact that he wants to do it through literature is honestly impressive.\r\n15:50:42 So those are my personal beliefs. My belief as a professional, you know, needing to preserve my job so that I don't get in trouble.\r\n15:50:52 Had to override it in that moment. So that's, I think that was the only book that I did not agree. I tried to buy a book. I did try to buy a book once that was vetoed by my administration, which was shocking it was um\r\n15:51:10 I don't remember the title. But I think it had the N-word in it. And it was written by a film study scholar who he kind of specialized in like spike lee like clearly it was just like a professor and African-American film studies had written this book.\r\n15:51:30 And it was recommended by the film teacher. Well, the bookkeeper saw The N-word in it and was like, you know, so that was one time that I had a book that I would have for sure thought was appropriate, but other people didn't agree with me.\r\n15:51:48 And then I had a mural that a student This was the only time that censorship really got real. I had a, for me, was a mural of Porco Rosso, which is from Studio Ghibli, a Japanese filmmaking studio.\r\n15:52:04 And the story is of a guy who lives in Italy and the fascist government takes over and he starts, he's a flying ace he starts flying against the fascists, against the Italians.\r\n15:52:18 Fighting for democracy. They use magic to turn him into a pig.\r\n15:52:23 And so it's like a pig man flying an airplane and this quote that says, I'd rather be a pig than a fascist.\r\n15:52:30 That a student of jewish descent painted in the library It was one of many Studio Ghibli murals, so I didn't think too much about it, but that ended up in an uproar.\r\n15:52:45 Principal who had a background in social studies was more than happy to defend. I think she had fun doing that so Yeah, it's real.\r\n15:52:56 All right. And I am not seeing any more questions. So I think we are done for today. But Jane, again, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. And everyone have an amazing rest of your day.\r\n15:53:07 Bye, y'all.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3596/collection_resources/141641/file/262033#t=0.0,3174.88"}]}]}]}