marketing – Informative Flights – Musings of a Teacher Librarian

Panda Madness

As we move into Week 5 of online learning I had a yearning to return to my librarian roots. I was prompted by our librarian network sending out a notice for the voting for the annual Panda Book Awards. Despite the closures the voting will continue. In my previous incarnation as a PYP librarian in Singapore I found it a lot easier to promote the Red Dot Book awards – you have a weekly captured audience in primary, plus we had our after school reading club geared towards preparing for the annual Readers’ Cup.

Things change in Middle School – puberty seems to affect the reading muscle as much as it does every other aspect of being. Also in China we have the “Kids Read” competition for middle schoolers, which is considerably more daunting – 100 books in teams of four.

Another aspect of online learning is that it is really hard for everyone to stay motivated. Our daily entry point each day is the Mentor discussion forum on Moodle. As much as Moodle is extremely robust, it’s also very old fashioned and clunky, so driving traffic there is a chore.

I’d been seeing a lot on my twitter feed on US librarians setting up for “March Madness” and that inspired me to get a “Panda Madness” going for March. Besides the voting I also wanted to put in some challenges for points with a couple of aims:

getting students onto our online reading platform Sora
getting students reading online generally
getting students reading the Panda Books
getting students to promote books through FlipGrid and book reviews on Oliver
making the daily sign-in to their mentor groups a bit more motivating and of course
having some fun

First off was selecting the books – in MS we’re literally in the middle of the reading spectrum so I could select from both the “middle” and “older” reader lists. I selected 16 of the books, leaving out a couple of picture books and trying to use books that were available on Sora so they could still be read.

The complication in China is that not only do books have to be available with rights in China, they also have to be approved by an agency for use. So the hurdles we climb (besides expensive platform fees and expensive digital rights that disappear after 12/24/26 months or 26 checkouts are:

lack of a digital version,
georights, or
publisher preferences. For example, the publisher Hachette Livre (one of the “Big Five”), don’t sell their ebooks to schools or libraries outside of the US.

Then there’s weird stuff, like “Front Desk” is available as an audiobook but not an eBook … usually it’s the other way around, books are available as an eBook but not audiobook (which kind of makes sense as there are extra costs and efforts involved recording an audiobook). I’ve reached out to Kelly Yang and she’s looking into it (love authors who are invested in helping one out!)

In the Older list we’re missing “How to Bee” and “The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge” I’ve reached out on Twitter to both sets of authors but not heard anything back yet. In the Middle list we’re covered, although it would be nice to have “Front Desk” as an eBook – there’s a hierarchy of how students like to read

Not at all (lol)
Physical Copy
eBook
Audiobook

Next step was making the knockout lists. That was a tough one. Which books to pair against each other to make it a little bit exciting – I must admit to have spent way too much time on overthinking this one.

Then I didn’t want to start the voting straight away, so for Friday (we have virtual WEIRD every Friday where I lead the Mentor discussion) I started with the motivation and getting ready bit. In order to do that I needed to set up a point system*, Libguide, Flipgrid and Microsoft Team, plus all the graphics. Needless to say that consumed all of Thursday in-between the usual Tech troubleshooting.

And then it was a case of waiting with baited breath as to the response – luckily it was extremely positive – by the time I woke up at 6am European time, my “copilot” on the MSTeam had approved 83 students and by the end of the day we had 121 students and teachers signed up (over 1/3 of our student population).

Yesterday I wanted to sort out the leaderboard and the scoring … that was another full day task – mainly because there is so much to set up – a current and reliable student/mentor group spreadsheet (yes, we’ve had a few poor souls who joined the school just prior to, or during the closure period), getting all the data of who had signed up to Sora – with proof, and then the most time consuming – going through the library records of each of the 16 books to award points to the consistent readers who’ve been reading the books since the start of the school year in August! A very manual procedure.

Another thing one would expect would be easy but wasn’t is extracting a list of “members” from a MS team! There’s no way to export that – so I had to copy and past from the list into excel and then sort it out and match to my master sheet.

Another thing that I spent way too much time on of course was creating the graphic of the leaderboard. I must admit to having found one I quite liked and then adapting it. On the first day students had gained 872 points and we had a history of the books being read 129 times. A lot of students / groups tied as it was the first day.

Then rubrics / criteria for the Book Trailers and alternative book covers were created. Luckily I only had to adapt these from the ISLN Readers’ Cup that I was heavily involved in during my time there, and Barb Reid kindly sent me the latest versions.

The last thing was to create a Form for students to predict the winner and to post the updated status to the Moodle announcement for Monday.

Hopefully the rest will just be maintaining the scoresheet each week and monitoring the Flipgrid; student book reviews on Oliver; and entries for the book cover competition and book trailers… The first knockout vote will be on Friday.

Let’s see how this goes and if we can achieve our aims! Already the teams who have teachers involved (they can take part with their group) are the leading teams… says something! Happy to share everything created with other schools affected by the closure – just flip me an email or PM on twitter with your email. Everything is on Pages and can easily be adapted / changed for different books.

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*Points for now – I’ll add to this as we go on

5 points for taking part
5 points per Flipgrid promotion of a book (multiple promotions possible – but you must have read the book)
5 points for a one paragraph review of a Panda book on Oliver
2 points for every Panda book you borrowed before school closed
2 points for signing into Sora (upload a screenshot to Moodle to gain the point)
5 points for borrowing and reading a Panda eBook on Sora (screenshot and summary to gain the points)
5 points for borrowing and listening to a Panda AudioBook on Sora (screenshot and summary to gain the points)
10 points for predicting the winner
5 points for predicting one of the 1/2 finalists
2 points for predicting one of the 1/4 finalists
1 point for predicting one of the 1/8 finalists
5 points per good quality book trailer following criteria
5 points per good quality alternative book cover following criteria
Each week new random bonus points will be awarded based on new challenges

No excuses: Syndetics

It must be an age thing – but as I’m getting further into my 50’s I’m becoming less tolerant of fancy sounding reasons and explanations that are actually just excuses for staving off change. This is the first of a series of posts on things that really annoy me as an international librarian, with a smattering of understanding of technology and a desire to serve ALL students, teachers, parents and administrators in my community as best I can. I have an overdeveloped sense of fairness and justice and I sometimes feel that librarians as a group are just too nice and suck up way too many things.

I’ll also admit to being emboldened by a FABULOUS new biography on women called “Brazen” (coming out in English next year – thank you Netgalley for the preview copy) You can preorder your copy now – suitable for High School 13+. And in fact this book just highlights what I’m going to write about today. This book originated in French. I’m currently totally inspired by the Guardian’s World library list and wanted to replicate it, adapted for primary school, particularly with a view to Uniting Nations day coming up in November.

Now I work really hard at trying to transform my library into one that is representative of my students. I love the fact that my one Bangladeshi student asks me every week if I have any new books about or set in Bangladesh. And that at the beginning of term she came to proudly tell me that she was no longer the one and only but had been joined by another family. And when I showed her our new book about Bangladesh she took time out of her library browsing time to show me all the things the book depicted that were special to her.

I also work hard on my libguides to make sure that my books are showcased graphically and visually to make perusing them interesting for primary level students. So this is when I get really annoyed that Syndetics, the one interface for front covers that just about every system, from OPAC to libguides to LibraryThingsforLibraries uses does NOT seem to recognise that there is a publishing industry outside of the BANA (Britain, Australia, North America) countries – in fact they even struggle with Australia most the time. And don’t let me even consider China – well they cheat a bit – a lot actually – thinking that one ISBN number should suffice for a whole series of books – even if there are 57 books in the series.

This means that my libguide with my books from and about other countries, my catalog and my destiny discover new books respectively looks like this:

Spot the problem? And Syndetics actually prides itself in the fact that the covers of the coverless books are now colourful with title and author. NOT GOOD ENOUGH! For my catalog, my library assistants spend hours manually inserting the covers, and for the much touted, over promised under-delivered Destiny discover it’s just a blue boring nothing. So 5 of my 8 most recently purchased books are just blue blobs. So if you’re a librarian trying to diversify AND to make your new purchases appealing the cards are stacked against you.

Before I started writing this post I thought I’d do a bit of research into Syndetics, and the whole cover image thing. And then I thought no damnit. I won’t. I don’t really care what the reason or excuse is. They’re selling an expensive service. They’re complicit in not improving the marketing of diversity of literature and I’m just going to put it out there and they can do the explaining, and hopefully a bit of soul searching on how they can make this better. What BIG things, what IMPORTANT and sea-change things they, as a big corporation as opposed to me as a little librarian in a little library serving 650 students from 40 nations can achieve.

What lies beneath

Just a quick post here, based on a bunch of letters I got from my G1 students asking what the “roles and responsibilities of a librarian were” – I had to very quickly cobble it together in about 3 minutes I had between classes, so I’m sure I’ve forgotten tons. What I wanted to bring across is that what you see is just a fraction of what you get with a teacher-librarian. And even so, it’s just so frustrating that whenever I’m doing one thing, it means I’m not doing something else that I probably should / could / have to / ought to/ be doing.

Fortunately I’d just been reading Nasreddine that morning – I’ve taken to reading a couple of picture books while I have my breakfast to set my day off, and it was the perfect antidote to that feeling of hopelessness.

Promotion

Student designed periodical stand

Lifestyle section organised like a bookstore

The survival of both the physical entity and concept of “the library” depends on it being well utilized. All libraries visited were extremely proactive in their promotion efforts. Most began during the orientation week with activities to get students into the library. These ranged from library orientation programs in the form of games, exhibitions and events. At NTU, each new student gets a letter from his/her “personal librarian” inviting them to tea!

Ngee Ann Polytechnic use their interactive space for presentations and lectures, outside visitors and have created a very inviting “lifestyle” area based on a bookstore / cafe concept. They were the first academic library here with a life-style area and took their ideas from shopping centres and bookstores and cafes and ventured out of the library to see where their students hung out. As a result they created a board game zone which is a popular cafe concept in Singapore. They have an extensive collection of both common and unique board games. Having a Board game rooms was a theme we saw duplicated in nearly every library here.

Ngee Ann – a collection on wealth creation situated next to the Bloomberg monitors and a presentation area where speakers are invited on finance / entrepreneurial / business matters.

Cafe with bar stools and ipads in Lifestyle area

Interactive desk top with games and quizes

Student designed lighting

Singapore Polytechnic differentiates different areas of the library by colors and has invited students and lecturers to play an important role in the design of the library and the library furniture and hardware. This has resulted in students feeling a sense of “ownership” of the space, as well as very aesthetically pleasing areas. Details such as display, lightening, notice boards, magazine cabinets etc, had been designed and created on campus.

Innovative flexible signage

The library was also exploring having makerspaces with 3D printers, lego mindstorms and creative space where students were challenged to create something with materials provided.

interactive booth

Almost all the libraries provided some kind of an e-newsletter or alert service to subscribers. Most had some presence on social media, the most common being Facebook. In some instances the Facebook presence was as a marketing or information tool on services or newbooks or event advertising (Temasek, Singapore Poly, Ngee Ann, NTU, NLB, ), in the case of SMU they explicitly chose to use it purely for social interaction and to use other mediums for promotion. Temasek had an interactive booth at its entrance with various features including an auto-photo link to Facebook.

Libraries also created posters to share around campus advertising new books, events or other services. A particularly cool idea was that of the off-site or on-site book fair. In the case of Ngee Ann, as they are affiliated with the Ngee Ann shopping centre, they hold a big book fair in the shopping centre, where vendors put books on display for sale. Students can then go and browse and “purchase” a book, if it is not already in the library catalogue, it is then purchased by the poly, processed and immediately loaned to the student.

Some of the libraries (UWCSEA, Ngee Ann, NLB) had a bookcrossing / read and recycle programme which both helped promote the library and literacy, but also helped with the recycling of weeded library materials. The NLB has a huge public booksale each year which is very well received by the public.

Since libraries are moving towards more digital material, they also needed to make the digital collections visible through signage or links on their websites, in the facebook or other social media pages or other posters.