September again...

So, you know how I blog every September and resolve to blog more? Yeah. Oops.

There are some big changes this year, and though my resolution is once again to blog more, I'm hoping that I'll be spurred to action.

For starters:
Our budget has been cut. We used to have £7,000 to spend, now we have £2,000. This will cover our LMS subscription, the security gates, one or two essential periodicals and, er. That's it. Oh, and paper for the printer, but only up until the end of November. Our book budget from the school this year is a big fat £0, which has come as a real blow. Our lending figures were up again last year, the library is well used by students and staff, lunch and break times are joyous chaos, and we've been cut. The mission this year is #OperationNoBookBudget, which you can follow along with on Twitter (we're @RPS_library) if you are so inclined. The aim for the year is to remain positive (very difficult) and still provide a good service to our students. Last year, over 80% of our loans were books that we'd bought in the last twelve months so maintaining anything close to our traditional lending figures is going to be hard.

So far we've been hugely lucky in that people hearing about our plight have been absurdly generous. We've been opening Amazon parcels wince the beginning of term to find items from our wish lists, I have a car full of books kindly donated by the wonderful @mattlibrarian at Farrington's School and two boxes of donations from Hot Key books, who are not only excellent publishers but lovely people too. It's not yet known if we'll be allowed to even publicise our wishlists to parents but the reactions and responses from fellow librarians have been stunning. With a bit of luck and a show of good sense from those in charge, parents will be able to contribute and hopefully keep us going! There's a new curriculum and several new exam specifications coming in this year that have absolutely no resources in the library so the situation is going to get desperate pretty quickly.

But there is good news.
The library has new windows! After years of freezing all winter and baking all summer in our greenhouse of a building, we now have new windows that 1. open, 2. don't leak, 3. aren't mouldy and 4. are double glazed! The 21st century comes to Roundwood! It's made such a wonderful difference to the space up here. It's cleaner, brighter, easy to control on terms of temperature and so much safer. The old windows were single glazed and not even toughened, so when they broke it was only the manky self adhesive reflective film that stopped showers of glass everywhere. All of the old parts of the school are being reglazed, which is fantastic. In a way it's galling that millions can be found for windows but there's no funding available anywhere for school libraries, however much I love the new ones! Not dreading winter is quite a good change.

Currently reading: The Dream Thieves, by Maggie Stiefvater; Outlander, by Diane Gabaldon; One, by Sarah Crossnan.