Sentiments On Common Sense

I had a nice compliment this week from visiting consultants we had at school. In our debrief with them at the end of an intense week of embedded PD, they noted to me that they liked working at my school because I keep my job focused on the big picture. Hmm… I thought… the “big picture”.   What exactly does that mean?

After it is all said and done, my search for the view from 35000 feet continues to keep me up at night. I wake up suddenly with a start and realize that we had not thought of this or that, and I really need to hone in on that idea further.  One of those is the role of libraries in our effort to provide a balanced digital and print environment to our students.  Yes… that’s right.. BALANCED!  Seeing as how the idea of balance needs to be defined, I was glad to see that one of my favorite blogger authors Doug Johnson (note:this site is blocked in China) has co-authored an article with Joyce Kasman Valenza in the School Library Journal titled “Things That Keep Us Up at Night”. (SLJ, 10/1/09) The article is targeted at librarians, but really has hit home with our administrative team at my school this week as well.  They write…

The future of the school library as a relevant and viable institution is largely dependent on us and how quickly we respond to change.

Libraries are no different than the classroom environment in many ways. The library, like the classroom is beginning to face an identity crisis of sorts.  The role of the learning space is being stretched by always available, always accessible and always relevant resources at the fingertips of the students.  The people who run libraries and classrooms are facing a sea of changing faces, with our students being completely at home in the digital environment and engaged in what seems like so many, many things simultaneously. Some of it good, and some of it bad and some of it useless and some it needing the guiding hand of a

trained professional educator, while other parts of it can be easily mined, harvested and mashed-up and republished.  Johnson and Kasman Valenza note that the challenge of keeping up with these trends will keep us all busy. Again, speaking to librarians they state,

Look around your state conferences. How many of your colleagues graduated from library school more than 20 years ago? Remember what the landscape looked like in 1989? How do we stay one step ahead of our staff and students in information accessing, evaluation, use, and communication in order to be seen as experts and collaborators? Do we know more about current information strategies than our school’s technology coach? No excuses. We must! If we are truly information professionals, we need not only to keep up, but also be on the cutting edge of changes in the search and information landscapes.

My favorite part of the article though speaks to “Advocacy by nonlibrarians”.  Here they write:

Rather than creating a perfect library, we need to reshape our thinking and create the perfect library for our individual institution. We can do this by changing our mind-set from adopting best practices as defined by our own professional organization to adopting a “customer service/support” orientation by crafting goals that support the larger goals of the organization.

Should this not hold true for all parts of our schools?  The best part of this though is that this is librarians thinking about and discussing their craft knowledge and reapplying it to a potentially new setting with a focus on the goals of the larger organization.  This is big picture thinking in action!  No wonder they can’t sleep. This is exciting stuff!

The authors write at the end of their article a bit of a call to action for libraries and librarians.  The word apathy certainly is written here, but I that the gist of the message is that without urgent action educational change, technological change and the variety of political forces in schools will define the role of the library for us.  I agree with the authors when they state their clear warning that:

Our best librarians will evolve, adapt, and thrive in effective
schools. But will they be called librarians? And will they be in
sufficient numbers for the profession as a whole to survive?

From 35000 feet I know that some things will be changing soon.

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