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Tuesday: Last Wednesday our fall book fair opened and runs through Friday, November 1. Book fairs are an all-hands on deck event.Once Scholastic delivers the fair we spend an entire half day of school (sometimes more!) setting it up. I’m so lucky to be able to have student library aides every period as one of their electives. They help me with a wide variety of responsibilities from shelving books to assisting with inventory and weeding our collection to keep it up to date, as well as setting up, running and tearing down the book fair. We have three fairs a year: a fall, a spring and a buy one, get one free fair right before summer. While we don’t make as much money as the elementary librarians, we are so grateful for the funds we do raise because we use that money to buy more books for the library, attend professional development, fund our annual comic con event called MythiCon and more!
Wednesday: Cataloging is another aspect of a librarian’s job that most people don’t know about. Every librarian in NBISD has their Master’s degree and is a certified library media specialist. When we get new books, like the ones in the photo that we used Scholastic dollars to purchase from the book fair, librarians have to go through each title to check literary reviews to make sure they all follow our board policy and are age-appropriate for our students. While we wish we could read every title, that’s just not possible so we rely on reviews from School Library Journal, Horn Book, Kirkus Reviews and more to guide us in entering these books into our collections. Once they’re entered we have to print barcodes, label the books and for those libraries that are genrefied, we
have to sticker them with what genre the book will be found in. It’s a long process that requires the librarians to know their collection well, their patrons and community.
Thursday: Another aspect of our job is highlighting books for our students to check out. Almost every week of the school year an NBISD librarian recommends books on the NBISD social media pages so that’s a great way to get recommendations out into the community.
I also have an Apple TV in the library that rotates book recommendations on various topics or mood reading ideas. We also have flip books all over the library for students to flip through that say “If you liked Wings of Fire, read these…” I also put book recommendations every month in the ORMS Library Canvas course. These titles are new books that we just got in the library that I’ve read and recommend. Reading is such an important part of our job to make sure we are recommending books that students are asking for and might end up loving.
Friday: Today was the last day of Red Ribbon Week! Part of being a librarian means you are involved in a lot of areas of the campus.
I am a DEIC and Campus Improvement Committee member, Team Leader, book study leader for professional development and am on our campus’s Kindness Committee. Our fall initiative is to insert kindness into every themed week.
It started with Unity Day then Digital Citizenship Week, now Red Ribbon Week so that we know to be kind to our bodies and minds. As we move into November we will focus on a food drive for Thanksgiving, December will be a gift drive for the holidays and in January we will do a coat drive for the cooler weather. Librarians also run clubs on campus! I have three: Chess Club, Alphabet Soup aka The Kindness Club and Meet in the Middle: Battle of the Books that starts next week. It has been such a joy hosting this take over this week! Please reach out to your campus librarian to see ways you can get involved in our schools!
