ChatGPT for School Librarians

ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence tool that is very easy to use and could have a big impact on education and libraries.  I asked ChatGPT to describe itself as if it were talking to a ten-year-old (because its first explanation was too complex!).  Here is what it wrote, "ChatGPT is like a robot that can talk and write like a person. It has been taught a lot of things people say and write so it can understand what you say and write back something that makes sense".  I see ChatGPT as being like a research assistant who can summarise a lot of data for you.  Which is awesome!

If you haven't already, please sign up to ChatGPT and explore.  Once you sign up, it is just like doing a Google search.  There is a high demand at the moment, so depending on when you login, you may encounter some delays.  ChatGPT is currently free.  Your chats are saved on the left-hand side of the screen, so you can refer back to them if necessary (sometimes these won't load for me if I've had the site open for a while, so I reload it).

What can librarians use ChatGPT for?

I asked ChatGPT about that too!  After all, that's what it's for. Here's what it suggested.  So far, I've asked ChatGPT to:

• suggest book read-alikes and books related to curriculum topics (at the appropriate reading level)
• give me ideas for fun activities to explain book genres.  
• generate a multiple-choice quiz about 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' (these were very easy so I then asked it to make them harder).
• In this example about finding fun activities for a book club, I modified my initial question as I wanted activities for when the students are each reading different books.  Then I also used the 'regenerate response' button (at the bottom of the page) to see if I could get suggestions for even more activities.
• I asked ChatGPT to find me picture books with good descriptions of character.  I modified my question to ask for quotes of physical characteristics, and then I had to remind it that I wanted picture books.  I notice that I asked very politely - I'm not sure saying 'please' was necessary.  Although my husband reckons once robots rise up and take over the world they might remember that and think more highly of me!

Here's a suggestion from Twitter:

I've had it draft library collection development policies, and what it comes up with is not too bad at all. Next up, librarian handbook. It can revise its previous work if you give it more parameters, details, or other instructions, which is great in early stages of writing.

— Len Bryan (@lenbryan25) January 15, 2023

Teachers will love this too!

Teachers are going to love ChatGPT and you can help them discover it.  They can use it to create lessons plans (here's one on sound, using the NZ curriculum), create discussion questions or multi-choice quizzes, generate key words and definitions relating to a topic, find suitable texts, and suggest academic sources.  You can ask ChatGPT to: generate citations using a specified referencing style, use an 'academic tone' when writing an essay, and use direct quotes as evidence.  It can also summarise, compare and contrast and return results in bullet points.

 

Limitations and concerns

There are some limitations to be aware of.  A key one is that ChatGPT doesn't access the internet. It can't suggest Youtube links and as it is a language model it can't generate any visual images, tables, mindmaps etc  Also, its knowledge base cuts off in 2021 so it has no knowledge of events that happened after that date. More limitations are listed here (scroll down the page a bit).

Concerns around ChatGPT relate to the obvious opportunities it provides for students to use it to cheat by writing essays for them.  Here's an article about it, complete with a ChatGPT-created rap about not cheating!  

It is important that we talk to students about the limitations of AI and the need to critically evaluate the results they get from using it.

How can I learn more?

• Play around on ChatGPT!  Think about things you want to know and ask ChatGPT about them.  Or ask it things you already know and see how well it does!
• Here is an introductory podcast from UK librarian Elizabeth Hutchinson (25 mins long) - ChatGPT for teachers and school librarians.
• Nine questions about ChatGPT, answered
• Prompt whispering: Getting better results from ChatGPT

Let's end with Ryan Reynolds' ChatGPT-generated commercial:

What Students Really Want from their Library

 As part of our activities for Aotearoa New Zealand School Library Week I decided to survey our students to find out "what do you like about the library?" and "how can we improve the library?".  To make it as easy to do as possible, I kept the survey to those two questions.  The survey was voluntary, but I ended up getting 288 responses from 18 classes and 2 teachers.  These were made up of one Year 2 class, nine Year 3-4 classes and eight Year 5-6 classes.  I didn't ask the junior classes as I knew that it would be time-consuming for teachers to write down the students' answers.  

I put the results into a spreadsheet and then took all the answers which were given by five or more students and put them into a word cloud (using wordart.com) so the results are easy to see.  I have a meeting with our principal to share these with her, and I will use the student suggestions as evidence when asking for funding for things they have asked for.

What do you like about the library?

These results didn't surprise me too much.  If you add all the book-related answers together then that would be the most common answer.  I wanted to differentiate between students who talked about the kind of books we have i.e. "cool books", with those who mentioned the number of books we have and those who like the variety of books.  And of course, some just said "books".  

The Reading Wonderland is a room in the library for quiet reading at lunchtime, and where classes go during their library visits if their teacher wants to read to them.  The walls are completely covered in a mural, which may be why students like it, or it may be because it is the quietest area.  Both "murals" and "quiet" were also common responses.

The reading environment was a popular topic, with the students appreciating the cushions and beanbags, and the comfortable, cosy and warm surroundings.

How can we improve the library?

It was nice to see that the top suggestions for improvement all involved having more of what is already in the library - more cushions/beanbags, books and murals.  

The request for more copies of popular books was one that has had me look more carefully at how many reserves we have for certain books and I have made some extra purchases in that area.  It seems we never have enough Minecraft and Baby-Sitters Club books but I will keep trying!

Unfortunately, some of the suggestions are impractical and we won't be able to implement them.  I would love a bigger library, or a second floor!

If you're wondering about the references to Milo, he's my dog who comes to school as a support dog.  The dragons the students want back are from years ago!  They are giant stuffed dragons that unfortunately need repairs that I do not know how to do.  I might have to appeal to the school community for help.

It wouldn't be an open-ended survey without getting some delightfully unique ideas for improvement.  Here are some of my favourites:

Nope, not doing Saturdays!

Oh dear, that's a very steamy, adult romance...

So nice that they were thinking about Milo

Yes, I want a robot!

This one was from a teacher (who loves coffee)

A satisfied, concise, customer :)

Some of the surveys were even illustrated.

A Reading Pep Talk for Teachers

On Friday at 11am, I was standing in front of our staffroom looking out over our entire teaching staff and wondering why I suggested that I talk about our library and reading.  It was a situation of my own making and my nerves were causing me to question my decisions.  However, I soldiered on, and got through my twenty minute talk without any major social embarrassment.  Now that it is over I do think it was worth doing, and I'm grateful that management gave me the opportunity.  It did take a while to make slides, but at least that meant for some of the time attention was directed on something other than me!  I thought I would share my slides so if you are in a similar situation at some point you can borrow some or all of them and reduce your preparation time.

I spent the first ten minutes going over the changes that we have made to the library over the holidays.  Information about that is here.  I haven't included those slides because they're very school-specific.

The second part of the talk was on why reading for pleasure and reading aloud are awesome and why some of them need to do more of it!  I mentioned that the two latest staff members to get promoted to DP, one at our school and one nearby, were both REALLY huge readers of children's books, so that was obviously good for their careers!

Our DP and I are interested in the idea of developing our own Reading Spine so I introduced that.  I hope to be able to meet up with individual teams during the year to discuss this more with them.  

I made sure to add that I meant the last slide FIGURATIVELY :)

Picture Book Shelving Arranged by Subject - Finishing the Job

The sorting process begins

Two years ago, we introduced a partial rearrangement of our picture book shelves.  This has been highly successful.  So successful that we felt it was time to fully commit so that our students can more easily find the books they want.  I blogged last week about how running a click and collect service last year reminded us that our students are looking for 'funny books' or 'princess books' and therefore arranging books by author surname is not very helpful for them.  When we first arranged books by subject, I only did it for some books and left the A-Z system in place for the rest because I was worried about "trying to get all the books to fit neatly into the subject areas when there is the potential for lots of overlaps".  But you know, if a book can be in multiple places you just pick the area you think it fits in best.  In fact, the biggest problem I had was with a couple of books that didn't quite fit properly in the categories we had.  Again though, the closest fit is the best choice and the world isn't going to end if it's not a perfect match.

We have a lot of building work going on at our school over the holidays, so for the first time since 2013, the library is not open over summer.  What perfect timing for a giant summer genre project!  Actually, because we like our projects BIG in our library, we have decided to 'genre-fy' the quick picks (early chapter books), readers, graphic novels and sophisticated picture books too.  That way all the fiction in the library is arranged by genre/subject.  This means that thousands of books will need to sorted, scanned into their new genres and stickered.  New stickers and shelf labels will need to be made.  Luckily, I have Esther, our Library and Resource Assistant, to help as otherwise I would get no holidays!

I did a bit of online research and also considered the genre categories we already have in our chapter book area (I can't believe it was 2014 when I 'genre-fied' this area).  I felt that keeping the same categories and stickers made sense in helping students find the same kinds of books they like as they get older.  We did simplify some of the genre names for the younger kids.  For example, our Horror genre has become 'Scary Stories'.  We've changed our Realistic Fiction genre to 'Friends and Family', not only because younger kids will understand this better, but also because of the large number of picture books that use anthropomorphic animals to tell friendship stories.  It did not feel right describing these as 'realistic' or as 'animals' (as the latter category is for "real" animals doing animal things).

Our Picture Book Categories

Firstly, we have the existing categories:

• Maths & Concepts

        Maths - includes counting, time, shapes
        Concepts - includes colours, patterns, opposites, size, perspectives

• English

        -  includes reading, writing, ABCs, creativity and using your imagination

• Historical (this used to be part of English but it had enough books to be on its own, it is also a fiction genre)

• Nature 

        - includes birds and the environment but no longer has animals

• Science & Technology 

        - includes inventing, internet safety, engineering

• Wordless Picture Books

• Maori Culture & Language 

        - includes bilingual

• Feelings & Life Issues 

        - includes mindfulness

• Fairy Tales & Fractured Fairy Tales

• Diverse Books 

        - includes different cultures, special needs, different types of families

Next, we have the categories based on our fiction genres:

• Mystery

• Adventure

• Friends & Family (similar to Realistic Fiction)

• Sports

• Scary Books (Horror)

• Fantasy

• Space & Robots (Science Fiction)

• Funny Books (Humour)

• Animals

• Classics

Finally, we have some new categories especially for our younger readers:

• Princesses

• Transport

• Famous Faces

        - includes TV & movie tie-ins, series books

• Superheroes

• Celebrations

So, there are 25 categories, which is quite a lot, but it's still one less than the letters in the alphabet!  I'm looking forward to finishing off this area and seeing how our students respond to it once school starts again in February.

Working out what goes where

5 Positive Things from 2021

 I think we can all agree it was a challenging year, so I thought I would share five positive things that happened in 2021.

1.  We got a school support dog, Milo, who is based in my office.  I wrote about the first steps and the first full week.  I brought Milo in for about three or four mornings a week, taking him home at lunchtime.  That worked well for us.  I was fortunate to find a very willing teacher who looked after Milo during morning tea two or three times a week when I was taking a book club or Lit Quiz group.  On the odd occasion I had a work meeting she took Milo to her classroom.  It was good to have one other key person that Milo could hang out with when I needed to focus on other things.  He adores her because she brings her own treats!

We got in Darran Rowe, a dog trainer who runs Mindfulness4Dogs.  He helped me train Milo and showed me how to work with classes.  We had plans to film some dog safety videos and run a parent night, but these were postponed due to the lockdown and will hopefully happen early this year.

Milo has had a wonderful effect on students and staff.  I would run into parents and they would tell me how much their child liked coming to school because there was a dog there.  Staff would come in to give Milo some attention if they were feeling a bit stressed.  Classes drew pictures and wrote about Milo - there were two pages in the Yearbook dedicated to him!  Here is one lovely sentence from a Year 4 student - "His fur is brown like chocolate and feels as soft as a blanket that I want to snuggle forever".

Sometimes a teacher would ask if a particular student could come in and read to Milo during their library visit, as they were having a bad day.  The calming effect he had on them was an awesome thing to be part of.  And of course, when students read to Milo it gave me a chance to connect more with those students and discuss which books they were reading.

Not a library book, a teacher's personal copy.

2.  We entered two teams in the Kids' Lit Quiz for the first time.  I hadn't even been to the heats before but it was so much fun (our students enjoyed it too!).  We're a contributing school so our Year 6s were competing against a lot of Year 8 teams, but that just meant there was no pressure.  There are lots of things I can improve on now that I have actually seen the Lit Quiz in action, and I am looking forward to being involved with this again this year.  I also attended a SLANZA online presentation by librarian Alan Dingley sharing how he runs his Lit Quiz group and picked up lots of ideas and enthusiasm!  

3.  I started a book club for some Year 4 reluctant readers.  This was an initiative interrupted by two lockdowns and a school policy not to mix students from different 'pods'.  However, I did learn a lot from the few weeks we did meet, and I am keen to build on this.  Some things I noted:

• Some of the students were a lot keener than I thought they would be, based on how many books they were borrowing from the library.  I had two sisters in my group, who turned up the very next Monday wanting to see Milo and also asked me to run the club on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays!  Three students, when asked 'How do you feel about reading?" on my reading survey, ticked the box that said "I love reading, it's the best thing in the universe" and no-one ranked it lower than "Reading is okay, I guess".
• Having Milo in attendance was a big drawcard (the group called themselves the "Midnight Milos"), as was giving students the ability to take an extra book out.
• I had the students pick out books from the Scholastic Book Club pamphlets and then I bought them for the library.  This was very motivating for them, with the added benefit of providing an insight into the type of books that they found interesting.
• Other noteworthy survey results:
• Most students were choosing books based on the title or the cover.
• While some teachers were reading aloud every day, others fell into the once a week or less than once a week category.  I will be giving the teachers a pep talk at their Teacher Only day in a couple of weeks!

4.  At the end of the year, we ran a click and collect service.  This wasn't a huge undertaking, and did not run for very long, however I was pleased that the Google form I designed worked well.  We enjoyed selecting books for students based on their requests and it was heartening when parents sent in photos of their children reading or indicated on their next request form that their child had become hooked on a series we had started them on.  One thing that became apparent was that when students asked for funny picture books or Quick Picks (our early chapter books), or princess books or picture books about cars, we couldn't easily find these books in our shelves arranged A-Z by author surname.  This has led to a 2022 project, which I will post more about soon.

5.  We did a massive weed of books while "bubble school" was happening, and it felt liberating!  I went through every book in the library and checked inside and outside for wear and tear, and made a huge pile of books to check if I felt I hadn't seen them get issued much (or at all).  I am freshening up some of the very popular titles, I retired lots of others and moved some that only teachers ever seem to want to our "archives" section in the resource room.

So, I had some nice moments in 2021 and I am very excited about the projects I have planned in 2022.  My hours of work, which were decreased over the past two years, are back to their usual levels and I am thankful that I will be able to interact much more with a wider range of students.  Of course, we don't know what else the world is going to throw at us, but I'll deal with that as it comes.

Motivating Reluctant Readers - A New Initiative

In Term 3, I'm excited to be trialling a new initiative aimed at motivating some of our reluctant readers.  I'd been thinking about working with our older students, but Esther, our library and resource assistant, suggested I start with Year 4s, because intervening earlier might have more of an impact.  She also suggested tracking them over several weeks, rather than just doing it as a one-off.  I like this idea because it gives me a chance to build relationships with students who probably don't come to the library outside of their normal class library visits.  My positive experiences running Year 6 book clubs then led me to consider whether using that format would work with reluctant readers.  There's only one way to find out!

The plan for Term 3 is that I will take one Year 4 student from each of our Year 3/4 classes (plus one more to make it a nice round 10 - easier for statistics!).   I think that will be a nice size group to work with.  The students I was looking for did not have reading difficulties, which are addressed by our teaching staff, but instead had motivational issues.  They are the kids who can read but aren't.  I sent through data on library borrowing statistics to help teachers with their student selections.  Three of the students selected had taken out less than ten books since the start of the year.  I got a nice mixture of male (6) and female (4) students. I will take these students out of class for 30 minutes each week, on a Friday to maximise their reading opportunities over the weekend.  

I have asked the teachers if their students are comfortable with me having Milo (our school support dog) with me during our book club, and they all are.  This might be something that is a drawcard to the students, as none of the other book clubs has Milo present (a teacher takes him to the staffroom at morning tea, when the other clubs are run).

Using my book club format means I will start each session with a reading question and offer tags for when reading challenges are completed.  I will amend the challenges to make them more attractive to younger, less enthusiastic readers.  I think running this group as a book club will take away any stigma about being pulled out of class, and the fact that only Year 6s normally get to have tags might also be motivational for them.  I will emphasize that this is the first time I have ever done this so I will be relying on them to give me feedback on what is working and what is not.

I will have the students complete a reading questionnaire over our first couple of meetings. This will give me more information about the students and their reading attitudes and habits.  I have printed out their borrowing histories to give me an understanding of what books they have been issuing.

I have been running Library Skills sessions with our Year 5/6 classes and have noticed that almost all of them put their hands up when I ask them, "who finds it difficult to find a good book to read?".  I have been sharing some tips with those classes on how to find good books to read, and I will introduce some of these techniques with the new book club too.

A Support Dog in the Library - The First Full Week

Milo after a hard morning's work greeting teachers

This week was the first week that I brought Milo into school every day that I work (I don't work Wednesdays).  My husband dropped off Milo last week and he did well (Milo, not my husband!), enthusiastically greeting the office staff.  However, he hadn't gone to the toilet and I didn't want any puddles if I could help it so the longest he stayed was for an hour.  We popped in on the weekend and checked out the sectioned-off area where he would be toileting.  It wasn't so noisy so he 'watered the grass' and it was one less thing to worry about this week as at least he knew what was expected of him.

On Monday, my lovely husband again dropped off Milo and as it was close to morning tea time I decided to see how he would handle our staffroom.  We are a big primary school, with over 700 students and a large amount of staff.  We went in with our principal, Anne, and Milo was taken aback at first as when we opened the doors he was hit with a wall of noise.  Once everyone shushed a bit he was in his element though, walking up and down and checking out all the staff and showing off all his doggy charm.  After morning tea I took Milo to water the grass and then a nearby teacher asked if he could come and visit her classroom.  As it was a Year 5 & 6 classroom I said yes and Milo walked up and down the desks and had a good look around the class.  The teacher had prepared the class well and they were quiet-ish and stayed in their chairs.

For the rest of my week I started at 8.30am and Milo only stayed two or three hours as I was monitoring his energy levels and also working out how to balance looking after him with getting work done.  From inside the library, we watched students coming into school, and Milo met a few students who help out in the library in the morning.  Highlights were seeing some of our more vulnerable children showing an interest in Milo, and also the amount of staff who seem thrilled to have a dog on-site and are passing on tips and advice to me.  We have already had one staff member say that she really needed her short time with Milo, as she was having a bad day.  

We have not started visiting classes properly, although I've promised to go and see a Year 3 & 4 class next week who are going to be sharing about dogs at a school assembly later in the term. 

On Thursday afternoon our school newsletter was emailed to parents and we officially introduced Milo to our community.  I also made a little fact sheet and added Milo to our staff page on our website (I totally swiped this idea from another school, but it's cute!).

Things I've Noticed

• I am no longer of interest.  The constant question is "Where's Milo?".  I think I'll need to make a sign to indicate whether he is at school, sleeping, or at home so that we don't have to keep answering that question!
• It's not just the students, a lot of staff want to see Milo and just interacting with them is tiring for him and time-consuming for me.  I expect that this will wear off a bit once everyone has had a chance to meet him, although I think I underestimated the effect on my productivity.  It is quite stressful trying to get things done at the moment.  Luckily I don't have any major events on this year, as we run our Book Week and Book Fair every second year.
• Just looking out for a puppy at school is exhausting as I want him to be well-behaved and well-looked after but I am also trying to work.  Lots of people have been telling me that having a puppy is like having a toddler, and there's a reason people don't bring their toddlers to work!  By Friday I was exhausted and I need to take that into account when considering how often Milo should be at school.
• A lot of foot traffic comes through my office as it is the closest door that links the library and the resource room.  This disrupts Milo if he is trying to sleep so I'm going to have to ask that staff use the other door unless they need to speak to me. 
• Milo has been very excited at school and enjoys meeting everyone.  He is definitely a "people-dog".  Thank goodness for that!

For the week ahead, I am planning on taking Milo on three days for about two hours each time.

A Support Dog in the Library - the First Steps

Last year, my husband wanted a puppy and I was not so sure.  Then I remembered therapy/support dogs, which are dogs that work in schools (and other places).  I'd read articles about dogs being used to help literacy and knew that our public library also runs a programme that uses therapy dogs as "reading buddies".  I thought this sounded like a wonderful idea and it convinced me to agree to become a puppy owner for the first time.

I discovered that an ex-teacher from our school, now deputy principal at a nearby school, brings her dogs into her school as therapy dogs and she kindly invited me to come and see one in action.  She warned me that having a puppy is like having a baby, which was intimidating, but I think it was a good warning to help me realise what a big commitment it is.  

We investigated what breed of dog would suit our lifestyle (not overly energetic!) and decided on a Cavoodle (a cross between a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and a Toy or Miniature Poodle).  Cavoodles are known to be very gentle and friendly and their size and appearance is not intimidating to children, which was another factor we took into account when making our choice.  I read that the Toy Cavoodle is slightly more fragile and better suited for older children, and the Miniature is more sturdy, so we went with a Miniature Cavoodle for a primary school environment.

My first step was to approach my principal.  I was sounded her out and provided this one page document for her to consider.  She was enthusiastic and offered to bring my proposal to the Board of Trustees for approval.  

I discovered that another nearby teacher, Kelly Daniel, not only brings her dog to school but has also set up a NZ Facebook page for support dogs that has lots of useful information.  I got to meet Kelly, and included her Dogs on School Grounds policy (from the Facebook page) and Education Gazette article for the BOT to consider.  I added a bit more information about how things would work to my original document (addressing training and toileting).  I also attached a copy of the Canine Good Citizen exercise breakdown, which I said I would work towards passing.

In September, the BOT approved a support dog for the school!  There was an understanding that if the dog was unsuitable for the role then the school wasn't bound to have him continue.  Although I had already contacted a breeder, it wasn't until I got BOT approval that I officially went on their waitlist.

We had second pick of a litter of five, and as the breeder is in Gisborne we had to make our choice from afar.  We asked our breeder for the most calm puppy from the litter rather than choosing by looks.  At the end of January we picked up Milo (named after the main character in "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster).  There was a settling in period, for us and Milo, including a day of despair about three days in, during which we wondered what on earth we were thinking!  

On Monday, Waitangi Day, I took Milo in to show him the library, which fortunately he seemed to approve of.  

On Thursday, I took him for a short visit to meet a few of the senior management and admin staff.  He was very excited to meet everyone (and fortunately well-behaved!).

I have ordered a special high-vis coat so that Milo will be clearly identified as a support dog when he is at school.  We will also be putting a notice in next week's school newsletter and on my library Facebook page so that our parents are introduced to Milo and know the reasons he is at school and what to expect.  Teachers will talk to their classes about Milo, and go over some dog safety information.  I am also going to be working on a list of books with dogs in them, as I hear they are a popular choices to read to dogs!

My husband has a couple of weeks off and I will bring Milo in for a few short visits over this time and see how things go.  My two main priorities are to make sure that Milo is happy and that he is on his best behaviour around our students.

Picture Book Shelving Arranged by Subject

Last year, we started to have overcrowding problems in our picture book area, making it harder for our students to browse easily.

Fortunately, our school's furniture budget hadn't been fully spent and I made a good case for how useful new shelving could be.  I asked for different shelving for our non-fiction area, which I'll talk about in another post.  I also asked for new browser bins for our picture book area, which would replace the display shelves and increase the amount of storage space for our picture books.

I decided to use the additional browser bins to implement an idea I'd been thinking about for a while.  I had read about a few libraries which had classified their picture books using subjects rather than the alphabet and I could see the benefits of doing this.  I was keen to enable our teachers to quickly find books related to particular areas they might find useful in their classrooms.  I could see some problems though, namely trying to get all the books to fit neatly into the subject areas when there is the potential for lots of overlaps.  I decided to use both systems - keeping the existing alphabetical shelving, and using the new browser bins to put a subject-based system into effect.

I decided to coincide the change with our stocktake so we had a few months to think about what subjects we wanted.  It also meant that we could add an extra day or two after our stocktake and do all the physical changes needed in both the picture book and non-fiction areas.

Once I had chosen the subject areas, I assigned them different coloured stickers to identify where the books would be shelved. We started by labelling new books with their appropriate stickers, then nearer to the stocktake date we moved on to labelling some of the existing books.  Once labelled we kept them in piles in my office. We changed the location on our library management system (Access-it) to 'Picture Books - (name of subject)'.  Then I realised that to find the location if you've searched for the book, you have to click on the book and then click again to go into the copy information. To make it easier I decided to change the book 'type' from just 'Picture Book' to 'Picture Book - (name of subject)'.  This means that you can see the location information as soon as you click on the book title. It also means that I can easily generate data relating to the circulation of these particular books.

After the stocktake was done we put all the picture books we wanted to reclassify into their subject areas. Once we had all the books in their piles, I realised that one of my proposed subjects, 'Concepts' didn't have very many books. Meanwhile, a second category, 'Nature and Technology', was very large and diverse. I decided to combine 'Concepts' with 'Maths' and split 'Nature and Technology' into two areas - 'Nature' and 'Science and Technology'. Fortunately, we hadn't labelled a lot of these books and were able to make the changes without too much effort.

Here are my final subject areas:

Maths & Concepts
Maths - includes counting, time, shapes
Concepts - includes colours, patterns, opposites, size, perspectives

English & History 
- includes reading, writing, ABCs, wars

Nature 
- includes animals, life cycles, environment

Science & Technology 
- includes inventing, internet safety, engineering

Wordless Picture Books

Maori Culture & Language 
- includes bilingual

Feelings & Life Issues 
- includes mindfulness

Fairy Tales & Fractured Fairy Tales

Diverse Books 
- includes different cultures, special needs, different types of families


We already had a bay for Maori language books. I decided to expand this to include books in English that dealt with Maori culture as I felt it would be useful for teachers to easily access these.

I know 'Wordless Picture Books' is not really a subject, but I wanted teachers to be able to easily find these books. I ran a session for my Teachers' Reading Group on how to use them earlier on in 2019. Here are my slides. I'm hoping to run a session on using Fractured Fairy Tales later on this year.

Esther made temporary signage for each area. I want to get some professionally printed along with our new non-fiction signs.

We only had a week left of school after the stocktake and shelving changes were made so I delayed formally introducing the teachers to the new system. I have a slot during one of the Teacher Only days this week when I will do this.

When we opened the library again at lunchtimes we realised that the smallest children might have difficulty with the height of the new browser bins. I decided to purchase a small step for them to use. There wasn't a lot of choice, a lot of the steps I found were actually to help children reach the toilet and were quite flimsy and not likely to stand up to frequent use. I ended up buying an aerobic step, so I've been joking that I can use it at lunchtime if I need some exercise.

We've been opening the library for one afternoon a week during the holidays, and it's been lovely to see parents making use of the new sections. We had one parent come up and ask if we had any books about maths and we were able to direct her to the 'Maths and Concepts' section. I've also had enquiries in the past about whether we have books relating to autism, and these can now be easily found in the 'Diverse Books' section. I hope that all our new sections will be helpful to our parents and teachers.

Update: Yesterday I spoke to our teachers and talked about the new subject areas in our picture book area.  As I spoke the teachers started spontaneously clapping!  I think it's fair to say that they are very happy with the changes :)

2022 Update - We've done away with the A-Z surname shelving altogether!  Find out more here.

Top 15 Books of 2019

In 2018, I did a post listing each of the top 15 books I'd read that year.  This time, I decided to do something different.  I wanted to reach out and share my top books not only with the librarians and teachers who read this blog, but also with our school community.  I wanted to keep things casual, so I chose to do an unscripted video where I picked up my top books and talked about what I liked about them.  I was inspired by the videos that American teacher Colby Sharp makes.

Last year, we continued to add student book videos to our library's Youtube channel, the Library Llamas, and I felt this would be a good place to upload the video to.  I was pleased with the response when I shared it on our library's Facebook page.  I think I'll do it again this year, but put it out a little bit earlier as parents might want to use it for present ideas.