Alaska Bush Library Service

The library in Diomede got a facelift over the past year. I showed up on Monday to put the books away. I am hoping to be finished in a week’s time. To understand, in order to get to Diomede you have to take a plane to Wales, Alaska, transfer to a helicoptor and fly the last 10 miles. A note on the pilot’s map warns against flying in Russian airspace as Little Diomede is two miles from Big Diomede which is in Russia.

The real plus of this work is opening boxes of books and hooking up students with old favorites like Bruce Coville and Katharine Applegate. Tomorrow, I will introduce “It’s a Book” to the third to fifth graders. Students here want to read, they just want to be able to find their books easily. The jr. high student that was reading the “Bone” series is asking daily if I have unpacked more.

All of this combines to make my job very rewarding.

The students in White Mountain are known for doing a great job with Battle of the Books.  This year they were up to task.  It was a strong race in 7-8th grade, coming down to a tie breaker round between White Mountain and Wales students.

Now is the time to get started for next year’s battle.  I am really excited for a new book “My Name is Not Easy” by Debbie Dahl Edwardson.  This would be a great book for the high school level.  The problem is that it is only in hardback.  The cost will be 13.50 from the local bookseller.  This is a lot for a battle book and I have argued against that price before.  On the other hand this book is such a great book for Alaskan students that I don’t want to wait the two years that Marshall Cavendish says it will be until it is out in paperback.  I have done all I can do.  I have a classroom set that I can check out to teachers and I have placed at least one copy out in each library.

I am looking forward to traveling to Savoonga next week.  It will be good to talk to the students and catch the library back up to what it was a year ago.

This is our week for Battle of the Books competition at the district level.

Questions are ready.  Times are set.  Teams are scheduled to appear.

Now is the time to evaluate how many students does Battle of the Books affect.

1. How do I get more students interested in participating?
2. With the move to ebooks, should I provide Kindles to some schools to improve their participation?
3. What should be included in the contract with schools to ensure that the Kindles are used, taken care of, and returned at the end of the year?
4. On a price level, do I push for a book that I think would be terrific, even though it is only available in hardback?

Time to take a break and go to inventorying the library books.

I will be updating what the perfect school library environment looks like for the next week or so.

1. Time — The library aide needs to have time to plan for their classes, do the library housework, and allow teachers and students 15 minutes a day to find a new book.
2. Space — I need help to figure out the optimal shelf space for each different book type(Picture, fiction, nonfiction, and reference)
3. Amount of books for a good library. I think we have great library collections in all of our schools. We need to weed the collections and I know this is hard for a lot of people but it is necessary for a good collection.

It is good to know what your reference question is at the start of the weekend.

It has been a great start to the school year.  Today I am in Gambell, Alaska training a new library aide.  I had an order of 300 books arrive at the school.  We were able to scan each bar code and make sure it works in the Koha system.  It should be a wonderful week.

I can tell it is summer time because the office is getting emptier and emptier.  I am looking at my summer plans which are FANTASTIC.

1.  Get my private pilot’s license.

2.  Merge my MARC records to have a true union catalog.

3.  Not so fantastic – burrow my way out of my office.

Here are the plans for each of these.

1a.  I have started with Sporty’s program for private pilots.  This week I am working for two hours on these.  It is hard to work through the whole plan when I can’t fly yet.  I am hoping the knowledge that I get will count toward the work that I need to get done when I get to school.

1b.  Enroll in a school when I get to Anchorage this weekend.  I am not sure who I am going to go with.  My husband, who is a private pilot, has his ideas.  He will be there to help me for five days before he has to come back to Unalakleet to work.

1c.  Physical.  I have this scheduled for a week from today in Fairbanks.  With any luck, I will drive a car to Fairbanks and Robert will be able to fly me back to Anchorage before he has to come back to work.  Otherwise I will be driving both ways.

1c1. Bad news.    It will take some effort to pass the pilot’s physical.  This will add six weeks to my time line for the pilot’s license.  When it dawned on me that this was the real setback, it helped a lot.  New time plan for the pilot’s license is for October.    Lessons are going great so far.  I have taken off, flown the plane, and made a landing that wasn’t bad at all.  This is getting exciting.

2a.  The records have been downloaded and broken up into two sections.  I am working through these when I have downtime at home.

2b.  Make sure the Itemtype designation is correct.

Update- I have broken the district library’s records into groups of 1,000.  This is letting me have a finish point for a batch of records and helping the monotony of working with 16,000 records.

2c.  Make sure the shelf location is in 952j and 952 c.

3a. Move RIF books to school basement. - Completed before leaving Unalakleet

3b.  Mailout extra RIF books to students.

3c. Check in materials that came in during the last week.

3d.  Organize Battle Books so FY10 books are on the cart.

3e.  Clean desk.

Other things may be added, but this is the summer list so far.  If I am far enough on my way to my pilot’s license, there is a class in Anchorage to take the week of July 20th.  But I am not sure if I will have enough time.

I can tell it is summer time because the office is getting emptier and emptier.  I am looking at my summer plans which are FANTASTIC.

1.  Get my private pilot’s license.

2.  Merge my MARC records to have a true union catalog.

3.  Not so fantastic – burrow my way out of my office.

Here are the plans for each of these.

1a.  I have started with Sporty’s program for private pilots.  This week I am working for two hours on these.  It is hard to work through the whole plan when I can’t fly yet.  I am hoping the knowledge that I get will count toward the work that I need to get done when I get to school.

1b.  Enroll in a school when I get to Anchorage this weekend.  I am not sure who I am going to go with.  My husband, who is a private pilot, has his ideas.  He will be there to help me for five days before he has to come back to Unalakleet to work.

1c.  Physical.  I have this scheduled for a week from today in Fairbanks.  With any luck, I will drive a car to Fairbanks and Robert will be able to fly me back to Anchorage before he has to come back to work.  Otherwise I will be driving both ways.

2a.  The records have been downloaded and broken up into two sections.  I am working through these when I have downtime at home.

2b.  Make sure the Itemtype designation is correct.

2c.  Make sure the shelf location is in 952j and 952 c.

3a. Move RIF books to school basement.

3b.  Mailout extra RIF books to students.

3c. Check in materials that came in during the last week.

3d.  Organize Battle Books so FY10 books are on the cart.

3e.  Clean desk.

Other things may be added, but this is the summer list so far.  If I am far enough on my way to my pilot’s license, there is a class in Anchorage to take the week of July 20th.  But I am not sure if I will have enough time.

It is sometimes hard to judge how your year is going mid-year. I have been recently thinking that I am not doing enough. Then I came across several things to help me rethink that.

1. A list of accomplishments from the yearly report of my predecessor. Quick check shows me in line for accomplishing a similar set of tasks that she had done. (I still feel she was one of the best school librarians in the business.)
2. Reading a blog post that used pictures from one school that participated in our Battle of the Books program. The students look happy with the program they are participating in. One of my main goals of my life is that students are happy with reading.  Seeing student’s faces as they get a school banner for their Battle Book win.
3. The support from people in my office when someone questioned a book that is in the Battle of the Book program for the year that is winding up. Support from coworkers is a definite sign to me that I am doing a positive job.
4. Comments from colleagues about the materials that I send them when they are looking for new teaching ideas. People tend to be surprised by the wealth of materials that we have to cover the subjects they are teaching.
5. The work that I am doing on Koha. I am learning more and more each time I sit down to it. I keep thinking there has to be an end to the learning curve, apparently not.
6. Purchases that I have made this year to build a collection that has a more digital bent. I have found a lot of dvds that I know will help teachers in their classrooms.

What I hope to accomplish this year:

1. ILTL Grant – Finish the write up by this weekend 2/10/08
2. Send grant proposal to others to get their input. Encourage input on the goals and activities in the grant to get other’s good ideas.
3. Visit schools that I haven’t been to.
4. Planning Fall In-service for library aides.
5. Set up a system for books with duplicate barcodes. We need to rebarcode the books.
   1. Determine which books have duplicate barcodes.
   2. Make new barcodes for those books.
   3. Find an easy way for the books to be rebarcoded.
   4. Go to sites to help with this process.

This should be enough to get me through this year and maybe next school year.

I am working on a Toshiba laptop that I have put Ubuntu on.  I thought it would be easier to get Koha working on it.  This has been a year of cleaning and organizing the library though and not working on the computer.  Going into Christmas break, though, I plan on taking the computers and learning more about the Linux system.

Koha 3.0 should be released this week or next.  I am excited about the changes that may be coming.  I am hoping to be able to use MySQL to organize the Marc records better.  MarcEdit is great, but I need to put the records together by ISBN number and I am hoping that I can sort and merge them using MySQL

I have learned how to shell into another computer from a Macintosh.  The word a Mac uses is ‘terminal’  With that I was able to put the Linux machine under my desk and just work on one machine.

This year we are reorganizing the media center and trying to organize the database for Koha so that it looks better.  This will be a long process that will only be accomplished with small steps along the way.

Last week, I went to Shaktoolik.  I uploaded a bunch of books and got them processed and set up for their students.  I just went into the OPAC and looked at recent arrivals for Shaktoolik.  Each of the books show up just as they should.  Their location has their school abbreviation and shelving location.  Their ISBN’s don’t have anything extra so their pictures show up like they should.  It seems funny, but just seeing that these records work like they should give me the energy to work on the older records and make them look better.