At Edutech in Brisbane in 2015, I had the amazing good fortune to attend the Masterclass conducted by Joyce Valenza and Shannon Miller. At the end of the day I took the opportunity to mention to Joyce that we had used her Manifesto in ETL401. Her immediate response was… “But I need to revise that! I must get around to doing that!”

Apart from revealing her self-effacing approach to the world of library celebrity… this response reminds me that Libraries are organisms – changing and responding to patterns of usage – so we, too, must adapt, morph, change. So, given that this manifesto was written in 2010 in the USA, how do we respond to it with regard to the section on reading? Let’s have a look… I have copied the relevant section here and have been thinking about what it looks like for my library as we face 2016…

Reading

• You explore new ways to promote and celebrate reading. You are piloting/equipping learners with both traditional, new, and emerging book formats–downloadable audio books, Playaways, Kindles, iPads, Nooks.

While my library does have a small group of iPads, they are not easily used to access books in various formats for students in my library. Our budget has not yet afforded us access to an eBook format but we have provided access to our local council libraries via our library management system. Our students, in 2016, have still not indicated a huge interest in having books delivered electronically and many of them are very protective of the paper format of books.

• You share ebook apps with students for their iPhones, droids, and iPads and other mobile devices (Check out Gale’s AccessMyLibrary, School Edition)

Similarly, while we use lots of different apps for learning in our library, we do not have ebook apps available on our iPads. This is again connected to budget but also to do with the process of managing iPads for shared use in schools. iPads were not designed as multi-user devices and they come with some specific management challenges. Top of the list… how does a school pay for the apps and how do we audit that process? It is easy to dismiss these sorts of organisational hurdles and to be perfectly honest… I have resorted on a number of occasions to simply paying for apps myself rather than wrestle with school administration over how to get money into the iTunes accounts of our iPads. Ridiculous but true…

• You market, and your students share, books using social networking tools like Shelfari, Good Reads, or LibraryThing.

Managing a social networking presence that complies with my employers Social Media Policy as well as being a manageable maintenance load for the variety of sites that my role as Teacher Librarian requires… costs a huge amount of time. Achieving an appropriate percentage of time allocated is challenging. While I have a presence on Goodreads, I currently do not share this with my students. This is one I’ll have to think about. Besides… currently completing the MEd has drastically interfered with the amount of fiction I get to read and record on Goodreads.

• Your students blog or tweet or network in some way communicate and reflect about what they are reading

Nope… not doing this either… while my library does have a twitter account, I currently do not use this with my students. Might have to think deeper about this one and figure out what this could look like.

• Your desktop screensavers promote great reads, not Dell or Apple or HP.

Nope… we don’t have desktop screensavers, user security means students must logout of their profiles and it resolves back to the signin page… no screensavers. Maybe this would be a good reason to instal a screen at the circulation desk… hmmm… good idea.

• You link to available free ebook collections using such tools as Google Books, International Children’s Digital Library (See our own ebook pathfinder.)

No… not currently… I wonder if this can be achieved in our new Library Management System(LMS)? I’ve just had a response from Softlink to explain how I can turn on Google Reviews so I might look at this next.

• You review and promote books in your own blogs and wikis and other websites.

Hmmm… I don’t currently have a book review website and probably should! Our LMS does have the capacity for students to upload reviews of books they have read but they have not yet engaged with the new system. This needs to be promoted for 2016.

• You embed ebooks on your websites to encourage reading and support learning.

Hmmm… no I don’t… but I do now have access to the school website… it might be time to do this!

• You work together with learners to create and share digital booktalks or book trailers.

And this one is a NO as well. In my high school library I currently have very limited access to learners during class time. Changing the model for our library has been a slow process and promises made have been reneged. For 2016 I have wangled my way into getting access to Year 7 for 1 lesson per cycle for Term 1… book trailers is part of the plan for this time.

Well… that’s quite revealing. Although we are a very busy library we do not meet the criteria that Joyce listed in 2010. This is very interesting… and much food for thought.

Reference:

Valenza, J. (2010, December 2). A revised manifesto. In School LIbrary Journal. Retrieved from http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2010/12/03/a-revised-manifesto/.

Picture credit:
Used with permission
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