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.

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.

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.

I know I had an entry titled this before, but I do love OSS programs.   Yesterday I mentioned that I would look at Pines because I like the tool it has to merge MARC records.  Today a Koha developer emailed me to let me know that he is working on this for Koha and it should be available soon.  I can’t imagine getting that kind of service from a vendor.

I forgot what it feels like to be back in the school.  There was a lot of work this year in the office.  Last Monday I traveled to Brevig Mission to help the library aide there put together the library.  The library had been a classroom the first half of the school year until elementary wing was finished.

It was nice to work with students.  I gave a lesson to high school students on recognizing hoax Internet sites.  That is always a favorite lesson of mine to give to students.  I had purchased books for the library last year.  The library aide and I were able to process the books and get them on the shelves.  Kindergarten students enjoyed “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus” and “Diary of a Worm”.

I am thinking of looking at Pines.  They have a feature that I would love to be able to use in order to merge MARC records together and keep the best record that you have and  integrate the items into that one record.

I have now decided what to do next.  I am working with a coworker to set up a Linux machine.  I will attempt to run my own programs and teach myself some programming.  I honestly think this is the future that librarians need to go into.  Not all librarians, but I like the ones that can choose what they want the computer to do and make it so.  I see more of these at the university level and I would like to see some at the school library level.  Therefore, I am stepping up to this for me now.

I gave a presentation at the Alaska Library Association conference last weekend. This week I will give another one today for the Alaska Society for Technology Education.  One of the interesting aspects of the two presentations is finding out who wants to know more about this program.

One colleague ask me to make sure that I mentioned how much time this has taken for me.  She wanted to make sure that I had talked about both sides of instituting Koha.  I did mention it because I know thatI need to rein in my enthusiasm for this program.  Five people attended the session at the library conference.  It will be fun to see how many people are at the session today.

I did have one librarian let me know that she was driving up to Anchorage a day early for a meeting so that she can be here this afternoon.  She wasn’t at the session in Juneau because she knew I would be here.  That gets logged as on of the biggest ego boosters I have had in this process.

Monday starts the training sessions with library aides.  They make a normal group of people when it comes to technology.  Some are raring to go with the program, some are willing to get into it, and some aren’t interested in it at all.

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.

Now that Koha is up and going, it is time for me to reflect on what could have made the process easier. If I were to start the process over for a new library, I would attempt the steps in the following order;

1.  Use Marc Edit to organize and update my MARC records.
2.  I would be more careful setting up my item types. I have everybody books, nonfiction books, Alaska books, vhs tapes, dvd,s and a multitude of other items.  I think I need them all, but I am worried that there are too many divisions.
3. I would have the librarian side of the program ready to go before I worried about having Koha up and running.  I feel guilty for how many times the person that is hosting the site has had to reload the records.
4. I would like to have a KOHA users group.  The listserv is mainly for people who are installing KOHA to the computers, but people using Koha seem to be left out in the cold.

That is about it for what I would do differently.  I have really enjoyed the process of putting the site up. I have a better appreciation for MARC records and for the possibilities of integrated library systems.

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.