Issue 117

The school library: more than just the physical space.

What is your job title, and what does your job entail?

Forest Hill College (FHC) is a co-educational government secondary school of approximately 580 students based in Burwood East in Melbourne’s east.

Our school library is run by two library technicians in a job-share arrangement, with one of us there each day.

Our job entails everything to do with running a school library: day-to-day circulation activities, collection development and acquisitions, cataloguing, promotion of library services, budgeting, making displays, and strategic planning for the future of the library. We also help with student supervision, teach staff and students how to use the library catalogue and assist with research skills. We work closely with teaching staff to make sure we support their needs, for example, by developing study guides with curated information to support student learning.

What is the most rewarding aspect of working in a school library, and why?

The most rewarding aspect of working in a school library is interacting with the students – chatting to them, helping them find what they need, recommending books to students that they enjoy and being someone who is available just to listen.

It was so rewarding to see the students streaming back to the library once remote teaching finished and they were allowed back to school. To see their excitement at being able to borrow books again was amazing.

What do you see as the most important part of the library’s role in the school community?

I like to believe that the library is central to the success of the school and its students. A library is a study space, a reading space, a social space and a safe place.

But I also see that another important part of the library’s role in the school community is beyond the school grounds. I believe that promoting the benefits of reading to the wider school community is integral to creating a school-wide culture of reading.

Are there any current issues or challenges facing your library? How are you working to overcome these?

Being a secondary school, I think our biggest challenge is to keep teens interested in recreational reading as they get older. I am very interested in the work of Dr Margaret Merga, and the Teen Reading in a Digital Era research project conducted by Deakin University and Queensland University of Technology.

At a local level though, we are working on building our school-wide reading culture – getting all staff involved so that the students see that the main adults in their lives also read for pleasure. I’d like to extend this to the whole school community, including the families of our students.

It is always a challenge when you get the students who say, ‘I don’t like reading’. To combat that, we are continuously working on chatting with the students as they look for something to read. We are working on genrefying our library – arranging our fiction collection by genre, rather than alphabetically by the author’s surname – to make it easier for the students find what they want to read.

I believe that promoting the benefits of reading to the wider school community is integral to creating a schoolwide culture of reading.

How do you promote reading and literacy in your school? Are there any challenges in doing so?

We are constantly looking at ways to promote reading and literacy within the school community.

These range from distributing a weekly library newsletter to the whole community, having an active library Instagram account @fhclibrary, and general day-to-day interactions with staff and students.

Last year we ran our first annual FHC Reads program over 2 weeks in November. During this time, we ran a number of activities and competitions for students aimed at promoting recreational reading. I supplied our home group teachers with videos and activities to share with students during their daily home group meetings. We also filmed some of our Year 7 students interviewing our school Principal and other teachers about reading and what they like to read, which we shared with the whole school community. Staff contributed photos of themselves reading to model to our students that they also read for pleasure. Even our two wellbeing dogs joined in.

One of the most impactful things we have done to promote the library and reading within the school community was to upgrade our library management software to Oliver v5. This allows us to provide a library service to the school community 24/7 and promotes the idea that the library is more than just a physical space. Oliver v5 allows our school community to browse the library catalogue with an easy and attractive interface, get reading recommendations, and access curated reading suggestions and study guides to support the school curriculum via Softlink’s LearnPath software that integrates with Oliver v5.

The most rewarding aspect of working in a school library is interacting with the students – chatting to them, helping them find what they need, recommending books to students that they enjoy and being someone who is available just to listen.

Developing a school-wide reading culture is vital to the continued success of the school library. One of the things we do to promote recreational reading to our staff is to provide a pop-up staffroom library. This allows staff to easily access reading material and be able to borrow and return books without having to find time to visit the actual library. Since we have implemented this pop-up library we have seen a big increase in our level of staff borrowing.

Our many plans for future activities include starting a student bookclub, holding lunchtime activities, running reading challenges and organising author visits. We are also considering installing a street library at the entrance to the school to engage our local community with reading and as a way to make use of books weeded from the library collection. All this to keep the love of reading alive at Forest Hill College.

Wellness dog Echo.

Developing a school-wide reading culture is vital to the continued success of the school library.

How do you encourage students to make use of the library?

Encouraging students to make use of the library is an ongoing challenge. We aim to make the library a friendly and inviting place, centred around their needs. We encourage visits from the school’s two wellness dogs, Casey and Echo, which the students love. By having Casey and Echo as regular visitors to the library, it makes the library seem a happy, inviting space. We have an activity table set up with social and group activities, such as a jigsaw puzzle that anyone can work on, or chess.

This helps promote the idea that the library is a space to build community in the school. This year we will be starting a kindness garden in the library courtyard. Students will be able to participate in lunchtime activities to paint kindness rocks with encouraging messages, and then take rocks from the garden on days they need a bit of encouragement themselves.

The students would probably say the most important part of the library is that it is somewhere they can get out of the weather!

What is your favourite thing about SCIS?

SCIS makes the life of a school librarian so much easier. The obvious benefit of the service that SCIS provides is that it makes cataloguing so much quicker and easier. I love being able to use the SCIS website to find and easily catalogue websites and online digital resources when I am putting together study guides on particular topics. This was especially useful when we were remote teaching during 2020 and we needed to make sure the library had online resources easily accessible for our school community.

The staff at SCIS are knowledgeable and always ready to help with any queries. SCIS provides an invaluable service that enhances the value of all school libraries.

Image credits

Images supplied by Helen Farch