Beyond your four walls – bringing the world to your students
Encompassing The Portugal by Glyn Lowe, Photoworks on Flickr. Some rights reserved
Whenever I talk to librarians and teachers about collection development and management the one thing I want them to take away from our discussions is this:
The school library collection is no longer contained within the four walls of your library or restricted to what is bought with your budget. It is anything and everything that you can provide access to.
With budget restrictions and information increasing at an exponential rate, it is no longer possible to have comprehensive non-fiction collections. “Just-in-case” hard copy collections that cover a broad range of topics on the off chance someone might need the information are no longer feasible for most schools.
However, with improvements in ICT and the roll out of better infrastructure, we can expand our collections by bringing in a wide range of free resources beyond our four walls. So what might this include? Hard copy or real life resources:
The collections of other libraries eg your local community library, National Library’s Services to schools collection
People that students might talk to about their lives or events that they were involved with
Resources available in your community – a participant in a recent course related their school’s investigation into Samoan independence. They had bought everything possible but still didn’t have much. However, many parents in their school community had relevant material, which they lent to the school for the duration of the research
Digital resources that you can link to through your catalogue or online library presence (blog, Facebook page, school library intranet) such as:
Encyclopedia Britannica online, one of the EPIC databases, provided by the Ministry to all schools, allowing you to expand your reference collection instantly
Individual topics from online encyclopedias. For example, if you want resources on Pacific Island churches in New Zealand, you could use the URL from Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand in your catalogue, or link to it from your webpage/ blog page
High interest topics on the Services to Schools website provides selected onlines resources for your students and teaching staff on topics that are sometimes tricky to find resources for
Any content that you curate using a tool like Livebinders
Papers Past – a great range of newspapers from 1839-1945
Local newspapers if they are online
Sets that you can create on DigitalNZ (Try doing a search on telephones – it might be quite a nostalgia trip for some of you)
For resources in a wide range of languages you can link through your catalogue to individual items in the International children’s digital library.
Online homework services such as AnyQuestions and ManyAnswers
E-book collections at your local public library
Don’t be limited by your budget or the size of your building – there is a wealth of wonderful resources out there, many of them free. They are your collection.