Hello, New Term!

Back to work!  Missed most of last week thanks to an appalling attack of flu that was well on its way to turning pneumonic* but now we’re back!  And plans for the year are already coming in thick and fast.

It looks as though the Government are reconsidering their cuts to Booktrust.  I'm a little worried that the wording is still very fluffy and could result in there still being a massive cut.  The hope of course is that there will be a way that the gifting schemes will  be able to keep running in some way that resembles how it is now, but we'll wait on the new funding announcements for that.  Students are asking if next year's Year 7s will get books too but I can't give them an answer.

The first email about the Carnegie Shadowing came in today and I admit it, I squealed.  Last year was my first year co-ordinating our Shadowers and we had so much fun reading, reviewing and arguing about the short listed books, I just can’t wait to do it again.  Hoping that some of the teething problems with the Shadowing site will have been sorted out, such as the endless logging in and the lack of paragraphing capability – grr!**

There have also been some discussions with students lately about what they’d like the library to be, and how we can make it better.  Sadly many of the suggestions are things that we just can’t do*** but some of them might be possible, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.  We’re in discussions with ICT now about the possibility of getting a small number of netbooks to compliment the computers that we have already, so that there are more available for break and lunch times.  The issue is money, mostly, and connectivity.  There’ll be no point in getting them if we can’t use them to connect to the internet and the school network.  The hope is that the ICT budget will be able to meet us half way, and with any luck, we’ll have five netbooks available over the next couple of months.  We’re also going to be buying some portable DVD players, so that the DVDs we stock can actually be played in the library.  Whoever thought of putting in computers without a CD/DVD drive, big  sarcastic thumbs up.  Well done guys.

Sadly it looks as though our Kindle plans will have to go on hold.  The good news is that they’re allowing Kindle users to loan out their books to others, which would make the whole system so much easier, but sadly at the moment you’re only allowed to loan out each book once.  Ever.  Which kinda defeats the whole being a library thing, so we’ll hold off for a while until that’s sorted.  Fingers crossed that by the time they make it feasible for us to have them, we’ll also have a wireless network up and running to make loading them up easier.

Work’s also underway to extend the INSET work that we started with teaching staff last year.  It was so much to pack into one session that we’re hoping to run a year long activity based on the ’23 Things’ format that’s been used so effectively by many groups, particularly last year by the Cambridge librarians.  If we can get approval and support from those on high, we’ll be working with teachers from across the curriculum to develop their use of Web 2.0 technologies and tools.  When there’s so much out there available for free, if would be daft in these times of cuts not to take full advantage of them.

Time to conquer 2011!

 

*Not sure if pneumonic is a word, but it should be.

** Can’t help it – ex-English teacher.

*** Would love to have a café and loads of armchairs!  That would be AWESOME.  But it’s just not going to happen.