Issue 129

What is your role in your school library?

I am a library technician at Strathtulloh Primary School in Victoria. My role title is Library and Resources, so I am in charge of getting resources for the library, as well as some whole-school resources. It’s my job to make sure that the resources are then all catalogued and ready for students and staff to use. Just to give you some background, we are a very new school. We opened in 2022 and I started in August of that year as a fulltime library technician. We opened with 719 students, more than the 545 students our facilities were built for. We now have around 1200 students.

To source books for the library, I read trade publications – I’m a member of the CBCA, I’m a member of ALIA and SLAV, I subscribe to lots of podcasts, I subscribe to lots of blogs, and we also have standing orders with some publishers. So, lots of books from varying sources. All of that is my responsibility to get in, get catalogued, get covered, and get out on the shelf.

We also use our library management system as an asset register. We catalogue things like our iPads and technology on there. At the moment I am cataloguing a ride-on mower, as well as some graphic novels.

A student in Krista’s library opening their box of books giveaway prize from SCIS.

What are the most rewarding aspects of working in a school library?

The students. Absolutely, the students. They’re also some of the most challenging aspects, but when you get a student who says, ‘I don’t like reading’ or ‘There aren’t any books that I like’ and you say, ‘Oh, OK, but have you tried this?’ and they come back to you two weeks later and say, ‘Have you got any more books like that?’ – that’s the best bit. Just seeing the joy on their faces. You can’t beat that. You go home and you just say ‘my bucket’s been filled today.’ 

What kind of challenges do you encounter in engaging kids with reading?

That it’s not cool. I think they get to a certain age and they don’t think it’s cool anymore. Although we have changed that culture here, I think, quite dramatically. 

It kind of stops being cool when screens take over. So, we support lots of things to help keep them reading, like online books, supporting reading in the classroom. Frequently we find that some students stick to one particular type of book and don’t want to branch out. And if there’s nothing new in certain series, for example, they won’t read anything. That’s why I’ve genrefied our collection. I’ve genrefied collections in my last three libraries – it helps students find the type of thing they’re looking for. I can now say something like ‘Everything with the orange tag on it is Humour’, and it’s all in one spot, which has really helped prompt them to explore more, because books like the ones they enjoy are clearly marked.

I think that Dewey is the original genrefication. I don’t want to reinvent it. I admire it greatly. I think it’s really useful and increases the borrowing, but adding some extra signage through genrefication helps adapt to students’ needs.

The other challenge is resourcing, especially with an increased need for dual-language resources due to more multicultural students speaking English as an additional language. I’m lucky right now in that I’m well supported, but funding is still an issue because the money’s got to go all around the school and support everybody.

Recently, you won our SCIS monthly book giveaway, which was for a box of CSIRO Publishing resources. Can you tell us a bit about how your library resources and supports STEM subjects?

We have technology classes, we have science classes, we have kitchen garden classes, we have art classes, so we’re quite involved in STEM. We’re doing Science Week. The teachers are actually planning at the moment for some of that, so I support them by putting STEM books on display, promoting those books, and actively looking for new STEM books.

CSIRO Publishing has such beautiful books. I love the fact that they’re often in a picture book format. It’s stunning to display them! Having come from a library that was 50 years old and seeing what STEM books used to look like, and now what CSIRO STEM books look like, and having all these beautiful new STEM books, it’s just so exciting to see. They’re so engaging with the big pictures, with the short, sharp facts. That’s a hook for my reluctant readers – they’re just so engaged with them now, which is wonderful.

What is your favourite aspect of SCIS?

One of the things that I really like is if I get those books that are crossovers – it’s a humorous book and adventure book – and I don’t know where to put it. Having genres within SCIS is something that I use quite regularly to help if I’m confused about where a book fits. I mean, if I’ve got some magical adventure books. Are they more magic? Are they more adventure? Having that info in SCIS is really useful. That, and I love the fact that I can just scan an ISBN and there’s the catalogue record. It’s all there for me. I don’t have to spend the time cataloguing myself. I used to work at two schools simultaneously and both of them asked me when I left, ‘Do we really need SCIS?’ And I said that it just saves your life. It saves so much time, saves so much effort.

What would you like SCIS to do more of?

I think probably I’d like to see SCIS do some more free webinars. I have attended a couple of them. They’re always useful in reminding users of what SCIS does for us. So I think that’s really good. I’d like to see SCIS promote what they do a bit more as well. I think there’s a lot that I could do with SCIS, but I don’t know all of that to use it. So, I’d like to see more regular free webinars, especially ones that are recorded so I can watch them when I’m at home or wherever. And more on-demand stuff that’s already online that we can just watch quickly, in the 10 minutes while we’re cooking dinner or something like that.