Those of you who know me know that I’m a charter member of the Marcia Mardis fan club.  Time and time again, she casually mentions a trend I’ve never heard of … only to discover that her prediction has gone mainstream six months later.  She’s an amazing predictor of what’s next (not to mention very gracious when I get excited and tell her about something I think I’ve “discovered” but that, in truth, I heard from her first!).

School Library Journal’s eNewsletter put Marcia as its lead story this week.  On behalf of Florida State University, she’s won a $400,000 grant to study how to get great digital resources to schools.  Here’s an excerpt … though, of course, if you want to be the Hip Librarian on the Block, you’ll want to read the whole thing! 

I have had the pleasure to teach the next generation of media specialists in my classes, and I don’t want them to avoid digital resources, but to embrace all resources equally so that school library services and media specialists can continue to be at the center of learning. I think of the school library as a learning lab where children use print and digital resources to explore ideas and create new knowledge …

This project reflects my desire to use these experiences to help media specialists increase their confidence with digital resources. In the first phase of the project, I will survey media specialists across the country about their current uses of and desires for digital resources … 

Concurrent with the survey, I will work with programmers to develop a tool that digital library developers can use to alert people to resources in their digital libraries right from the desktop. Now, I’m thinking that the tool will probably be RSS-based. It will do more than just give them descriptions of the resources, it will include links to downloadable MARC records that can be ingested into the OPAC …

I will use the results of the survey to design professional development experiences for a corp of media specialists to help them use the tool to find and integrate resources into their collections. This phase will also include professional development for using the resources like editing video and audio.

In phase III, I will work with the media specialists and their science teachers to create learning experiences with the digital resources. My hope is to get students involved in this phase so that we can get kids excited about using digital resources in the media center. Throughout the project, we’ll be documenting our processes and outcomes and will prepare to scale up and out the tool and professional development (as well as the successes!) …

Here’s how I envision it working: Mary R., a middle school media specialist, subscribes to the environmental science RSS feeds from her selected digital libraries. In the feeds, Mary sees descriptions for video clips and images about protecting the environment that supplement books and DVDs she has in her school library collection. Mary clicks on the links in the RSS entries she likes to download the metadata records to her desktop in MARC format. In her school library’s OPAC, Mary uses the import function to ingest the records she just downloaded from her digital library RSS feed. Now, her users will find those digital library resources along with the other environment resources in her library OPAC.

RSS to MARC to OPAC … you heard it from Marcia first!

American Libraries is reporting a surprise announcement by Nashville’s mayor that the Nashville Public Library system would begin taking over the city’s school libraries in 2009.  Funnily enough, they didn’t ask any school librarians or school officials:

Nashville Public Library Director Donna Nicely confirmed … that she and Mayor Dean had been conferring with each other for several months about the prospect of combining public and school library operations … “[H]ere’s an idea that truly could transform the public library and the school libraries because we would be enfolding them into the public library structure,” Nicely said, explaining that the idea was “strictly a proposal at this point.” However, she told CBS affiliate WTVF-TV at the press conference, “It‘s just a matter of organizing it and understanding how it all works and going forward with it.”

But school officials seem to have been left out of the loop. “We can’t say whether or not this is something we could do or could not do,” MNPS spokesperson Olivia Brown told AL. “At this point, we’ve not had any discussion, we’ve not had any proposal presented to the school board.”

The plan as envisioned by Nicely and Dean starts with the public library taking on the acquisition of materials for high school libraries “because Ms. Nicely says those libraries most reflect, in size and setup, what our branch libraries are like. So those would be the easiest to enfold into our library system,” mayoral Public Information Officer Janel Lacey told AL …

The next day [after the November 20 press conference], Dean and school officials disclosed letters dated November 20 that they had just exchanged. Dean’s letter to MNPS Acting Director Chris Henson cited a prior conversation between the two about “the benefits of consolidating the library services of Metro Schools and the Nashville Public Library” and advised Henson that library Director Donna Nicely “is prepared to move forward with this endeavor . . . with preparation starting in January 2009 and the first phase, primarily focused on combining the procurement of materials [for the public library and high school libraries], taking effect July 1.” Asserting that “this decision is common sense,“ Dean went on to say, “I know the libraries in Metro Schools have staff devoted to supporting the education we give our students in the classroom, and I believe this collaboration will greatly enhance their ability to do so.” (MNPS spokesperson Brown told AL that the system of 137 schools currently budgets for almost 200 librarians and aides.)

…[S]chool board Chairman David A. Fox … emphasized, there had not yet been any “meaningful conversation” between city and school officials about a library merger aside from comments that “seemed to be just exploratory and . . . confidential.”

Anticipating that “we’ll be sitting down with school officials soon to talk over what this means,” with the phase-in of consolidation starting by the end of 2009, Nicely told AL that idea of NPL overseeing school-library services emerged from a series of public hearings about the public library’s 5–10-year plan that began eight months ago. “We heard such a strong concern from people in the city about the teenagers. What are they doing after school? Could the public library assist them with after-school activities?” she explained, characterizing citizens’ comments as reflecting “an urgent concern, worrying about gangs.” Asked repeatedly by members of the public “how much more closely could we work with the public schools,” Nicely said she and Dean began to discuss the possibilities.

Nicely added that she saw enormous benefits for high-school students, who would have access from their school-library catalogs to Nashville Public Library’s 1.5-million holdings and—thanks to NPL’s online link to the records of area universities—a gateway to an additional 5 million items “if we can merge the automation systems.” Noting “all the programming that goes on in these public libraries after school for our teens,” she asked rhetorically, “Why can’t all of those programs be across the city in all the libraries,” with school libraries remaining open after hours thanks to the merger.

“If we’re going to make this work, then the school libraries need to be under the purview of the public library,” Nicely mused, adding, “If you think about all the staff as one entity, then you’re moving among and strengthening all the libraries.” Citing the profession’s often-expressed dream of “making [libraries] the center of life in the schools and the community,” Nicely predicted, “This is going to do it.”

I don’t know the specifics of this case, but I do know one thing: nobody asked what was “wrong” with school libraries that could only be fixed if the public libraries took them over.   I’m working hard to tamp down my feelings of public library colonialism. I am fighting my fingers as they yearn to type words like “presumptive” as I struggle to describe the behaviors of officials who went so far as to create a timeline for project implementation without ever consulting the schools or school librarians to assess their current or future needs. 

There are a few small towns in Michigan where the public and school libraries share space, generally with a combined public/school library staff. I know a family who lives in one of these communities and enjoys how they can feel connectd to the school via the library, even though they no longer have school-aged children.  Those projects are partnerships with mutual responsibilities and benefits.

As reported in AL, this isn’t.  It takes chutzpah to announce a takeover without even asking the other folks if they want to surrender.  And it is a narrow vision when one limits the role of school libraries to acquisitions, programming, and a union catalog.   And the assumption that the only solution to finding after-school options or teens is if the public schools take over – not share, collaborate, or combine resources?  I’m speechless.  Even reading the interview with Nicely in Library Journal doesn’t ease all of my concerns.

Someone please leave me a comment telling me I’ve read this story wrong and that this was just a bad dream.  Please.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran the article, “Empty Shelves, Filled with Imagination.”  

When this article hit my Google Reader account (yup, I’m officially swapped over from Bloglines after too many glitches), the one-sentence summary of the article read, “With minimal resources available, a school librarian gets creative.”  

I got a little bit excited at the idea that the Times would run an article that dealt with school libraries, imagination, and a creative school librarian.  

The article is about a Brooklyn school librarian who is creating a library by spreading out books to fill up all the shelving, spending her $3000+ book budget, applying for grants, and garnering book and magazine donations from her family, doctor, and dentist’s offices.  Those efforts take many hours of after-hours work.   (And I have to say … ewww … who wants those pawed-over hand-me-downs from medical offices?  And when is the last time you saw a teen-friendly magazine in the waiting room?) 

It’s obvious from the article’s photo that this is an impoverished collection and that the librarian’s only hope for overhauling it was to look for resources outside the regular budget.    And it sounds like the librarian chose to take up that gauntlet and to leverage her personal relationships to do it, which is great. 

But the article left me feeling sad.  What this school librarian is doing is so similar to what many school librarians do and have done for years.   

Many — if not most — school librarians are dealing with static or shrinking budgets.  When I did my master’s practicum, I worked in a school library in a staunchly middle-class district that had zeroed out its book budgets as a cost-saving measure.  They didn’t even have this librarian’s $3300 to fuel their high school collection of print and online resources.  (For what it’s worth, the article focuses solely on print materials.) 

I often define “creative,” in part, as “doing what others aren’t.”  So under that definition, are the efforts of this hard-working librarian “creative” or merely the state of our profession in many schools?   

This article could have been so different if the reporter and editor had recognized that this situation isn’t a one-off — it’s a regular occurrence in far too many school libraries.  One valiant librarian is “creative” — but a profession’s worth?  That’s a scary reality.