Becoming more knowledgeable....

I want to be a good librarian, I do, but where do you start? What makes a librarian good? (Right now I really don't want to know the answer to this, it's just hypothetical.) Is it the lessons that cover library skills? Or maybe it's the lessons that cover library skills and tie to each grade level curriculum. Perhaps it is the amount, variety, cleanliness, neatness of the books within a librarian's collection. Or is it simply the smile on the librarian's face when students come in the door. An invitation to explore the books within the collection? I'm going to work really hard on this last one, and let the rest fall into place.

When is it ok to go back to the classroom?

So I have started my new job. The library is up and running. Students come in they have a lesson and they can check out books... and I still feel lost. There are so many things that I don't know how to do. I finally figured out (I think) how to add new books into the system, but I have a huge pile of books that need to be repaired or possibly taken out of the system. Where's the guide to all of this? So my question is, when can I move back into my classroom? Where students are mine, curriculum is mine and the space I teach in is mine. I never fully realized the scope of what needs to be accomplished in the library setting, the necessity of having to learn each grade level's curriculum in addition to the library curriculum, and the "school wide" feeling of what needs to be taken care of. Is it always so overwhelming to try something new?

Where do I sit?

I feel like such a middle schooler, but really, where do I sit? My second grade team used to save each other seats for important group events like faculty meeting and lunch. I seemed to have lost my "place". Also, especially at faculty meeting, I don't really fit in. Much of the discussion covers specific grade level information. Will I always feel like I'm on the peripheral edge of my school community?

What's next?

I assumed that staying in the school where I taught would make my job change easier. Unfortunately I didn't think about how others and myself would be able to compare my librarian skills with my predecessor's. He was a whiz with technology and he seemed to know how to do everything, and now there's me. I don't feel like I really know how to do anything within my new job position and to make matter's worse, I'm not sure who to call with questions. I think a huge drawback to being the librarian, is that there is no other librarian in the whole school, you're all alone. There's no quickly walking next door to find out how someone else is managing.

This is harder than I thought it would be.

The first official e-mail I received as the Nibley librarian was a little disturbing, but since I wasn't literate in Library Lingo, I wasn't really sure. I took my e-mail to a librarian friend to see if the message meant what I thought it did. Sure enough I found that I was required by my district to re-barcode my entire collection. However, because of technicalities I couldn't begin the job yet. Also, over the summer, library time at my school had been changed to a prep time. This meant that teachers would no longer acccompany their classes to the library. Instead the time their class spent in the library would be their time to prepare. I was not sure how this would affect me, but I felt anxious about what this change might bring. The initial problem that being "prep" brought me was that I was unable to close the library in order to handle the re-barcoding process. Nibley Library was open to students beginning the first day of school. I felt badly that my initial lesson to students had to include issues such as why students could not check out books or take Reading Counts quizzes (yet another technical issue). Welcome to the library!

Feeling like change?

I have been teaching in the classroom for 13 years. In the last 10 years, I had mentioned a few times to our librarian that if I were to work on my master's that I would be interested in including my media endorsement. Last spring he received a job as a principal, leaving the media position at our school available. Well, things fell right into place, and now I am the librarian. Exactly what I thought I wanted.