Alaska Bush Library Service

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.

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.

Today I finished up the Battle Book Posters for this year.  These posters will be printed out on a large printer.  I am hoping that these posters will serve as a reminder to students to read their batttle books so that we have more student participation.

This weekend I will work on merging the MARC records.  That job does not work if you have other people around to interrupt you.  This weekend will be a good one to work on that.

Last night I couldn’t sleep and I had the interesting experience or watching the sunset merge into the sunrise.  I thought we were too close to fall to see that at this time of year.  The sky does get dark for a while, but you can always see the rim of light at the edge.

Wow,

It is hard to believe that the 2007-08 school year is upon us already.  Today is the first day of the year.  I didn’t get my list of things that I wanted to before school started, so I am starting tonight to finish consolidating the MARC records before we reload them to Koha.

I need to order Harry Potter #7 for all schools and Battle Books for schools that wanted them.  Cleaning the desk was the first job and it is done for the most part.  I still have a lot of books that need to be set up and ready to go, but I can see the top of my desk which is a plus over this morning.  Here is a list of the upcoming events that I need to finish.

1. KOHA record integration.
2. Battle Book orders.
3. Harry Potter orders.
4. RIF distribution box up.

I also need to set up for the AASL conference that will be done before the week is out.  Boy, I hope this all gets done.

It is great to be a librarian right now. There are so many technologies we can use to bring information to our patrons that it is mind boggling.  I just want to know how to not just learn of the new technologies but learn how to use them effectively with staff and students.  I am very excited to be going to the NECC 2007 conference.  I have wanted to go for years.

Today I got on the conference site and started planning my schedule.  There are so many technologies that I know about.  I hope to better learn how to use them.

An email came today through lm_net that asked about districts using Koha.  I tried to call the person, but no one was there.  I emailed him and hope he gets back to me tomorrow.  I would love to help someone new join in.  The more school districts that are using it the less money we would each have to contribute to make the changes that would make the program more school friendly.

My mom asked me the other day what am I planning on doing now that I have finished the work on Koha.  I don’t think she understood that getting the program up and running was just the first step.  I am now building training modules using Adobe Captivate on how to use Koha.

The other main task I have is to visit all of the libraries in my system to make sure that the library aides are comfortable using Koha and teach students better information searching techniques. Those two things will take me to the end of the year.  I also want to edit my records to make sure that if the picture of a book cover is available, it shows up in the OPAC.  Add to that ordering materials for subject kits, RIF books, and getting ready to attend three conferences in June… Somehow I don’t think March, April,  or May will be boring.

I am excited to be going to NECC in Atlanta the end of June and BookExpo in New York the end of May.  Both of these conferences are on my own time and without school district money, thanks to the  Alaska Association of School Librarians.  I received a $750.00 scholarship to attend a national conference.  I will spend more than that money, but I will go to two different conferences in which I hope to bring back a lot of good information for the association and for me.

For the last week and a half I have been fixing MARC records in my spare time.  This means I take my computer home each night and purge lines that shouldn’t be in the records for hours each night.  Note to self, never make broad based copying in database records.  Each book record should have one line for each thing with very few exceptions.

The records look good, but not great.  My problem now is that I want them to look great.  I will upload what I have today and call it quits on editing records for four to five months.  I still have changes that I want to make so that it looks more like a union catalog rather than a collection of individual records.

Library conference is a week from now.  I have three or four posters to get ready and two Powerppoints to prepare.  The good news is that two thirds of my desk is clean.  Here is to working on the third part today.

I have to know when not to be bothered when a principal wants to talk about a program that I oversee.  Yesterday I had a pleasant surprise when a principal wanted to talk about the Battle of the Books program because participation is down.  He didn’t want to give me a hard time, he wants to talk to others in our district about why and what we can do about it.  I don’t know why my first thought is that someone wants to get on my case.   The results are in from the meeting, it seems that students these days have a lot of options now that they didn’t have before.  Participation in all activities seem to be down.

Wow,

Dan finished uploading the records to the BSSD OPAC yesterday morning. I can see I need to edit some records, but it looks great. I am really happy that this part is done.

Thanks go out to everyone who was helpful. Josh at LibLime, who answered questions when I was at the end of my rope. Dan at DanTech Services, who is hosting this program for me also gets a great deal of thanks. We have used Skype to ask each other questions and figure out what we needed to do next.

Dan and I will present Koha at the ASTE conference here in Alaska next month. I am presenting at the library conference the week before. I hope there is some interest.

Now the next part, I need to train library aides how to use the new program. We need to set a date to check everything in and out on Koha. I didn’t change the data for what was in/out on Koha. Now that I think about it, I wish that I had set everything as checked in.

Battle of the Books is coming soon. Students have 12-15 books to read throughout the school year. In February, they compete with other teams via videoconferencing to see who will represent the district at the state battles. State Battles are still done by telephone. I think it will be a great week.

I learned an important lesson yesterday. The definition of the terms biblioitems and items. biblioitems refers to the marc record for a book. Items refers to each individual book. Thanks to Josh at Liblime.

I took a chance to call Liblime yesterday. I am not one of their customers. I was hoping that they would help me with a couple of questions. They were. Now I am changing Marc records again to put all the individual information in 952 rather than 852. Itemtype is staying in 852.

I am using Marc Edit by Terry Reese which is another OS program to edit the Marc Records. Marc Edit is a nice program that allows me to do uniform changes throughout the records. Before you can do that, you break the marc records down so that they can be read by text editor. Then there are some find and change commands that you can use. In the end the program rebuilds the text file into MARC so that you can use it.

What this means for me, over the next few days I will be rebuilding the marc records for 17 different sites. In the end event, I will take the records to Dan at DanTech services and he will upload them to the computer. He will have dumped the current records that are in the system. We should have a great system at that point.

After that, patron records and beyond…..

The problem was a directory that hadn’t been installed. I posted my problem to the listserv for Koha today and found that information. Tonight Dan looked at the file and uploaded the necessary file and we are uploading MARC records.

SirsiDynix put on a great webcast this morning entitled 25 technologies in 50 minutes. This was very well done. I am happy that 90% of the technologies I have used. Now I just need to learn the other 10%. One of the best ideas I got from the class was to just spend 15 minutes a day learning the new technologies. With that we should be able to keep up.

As I have now been at work for 13 hours, I think it is time to go home. I can guarantee that I will be back here at 7 am tomorrow for the fun of uploading the records to Koha. It feels so good to have made progress.