Every
month I am part of the leadership team meeting at my school, and thankfully, my
principal gives me time on the agenda to talk about the library. A few
days before the big meeting, I prepare three talking points: readership,
classes in the library, and special projects. Normally, classes in the
library would entail coming in to check out books or receive help
with research. However, my library is limited to Dual Credit virtual
classes and classes without SUBs this year due to COVID-19. It is not
ideal, but I also tell myself this is not permanent. This year is different. It would be easy to complain about my situation. Instead I choose to focus on the ways I am reaching students. However, I do think it is important for the administration to know what classes we are covering and how that affects our readership and my special projects. That is why I also added "time spent monitoring classes" as part of my 6 weeks library usage statistics report. I just want to make sure we are all on the same page.
In preparing for my March meeting, I decided to concentrate on our databases for the "readership" portion of my talking points. When I arrived at Summit 4 years ago, I felt that no one was using our databases, and no one wanted help from the librarian. Spring of my first year, a junior English teacher took and chance and asked for help. Ms. Washington was my gateway. Databases were still unpopular, but I was able to show the students how MLA format was included. Then they became more popular. Each 6 weeks I would watch my database usage statistics, and the slow growth was frustrating at the time, but I see the gains now. I tracked database searches for 3 months (Jan - Mar) for 2018, 2019, 2020, & 2021 just to see. Here is the comparison I reported in the March leadership team meeting.
Remember, this is only for January, February and March of each year. You can see the dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 shutdown. Our last day of in person school that year was March 6th.
I always learn something when I look at the numbers. For instance, my original statement about no one using databases wasn't exactly true. If you look at the 2018 numbers, you can clearly see I was able to influence some teachers and students; they were indeed using our resources. I am pretty excited about the numbers this year, and I hope the usage only goes up from here. I have decided that slow growth is better than no growth.
If you are also frustrated with an area of your library program, I urge you to look at the numbers. Find the data. Sometimes it tells a different story.
