annualreportfinal

Stillwater MS/HS Library Media Center Annual Report 2010-2011 Stillwater Middle-High School Stillwater Central School District 1068 Hudson Avenue Stillwater, NY 12170 518-373-6100 x30034 http://tiny.cc/scsdmshslibrary

Amy Carpenter, School Library Media Specialist Carolyn Hayner, Library Aide

6/24/2011

Stillwater MS/HS Library Media Center Annual Report

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September, 38

October, 53

November, 34

December, 28

January, 42

February, 34

March, 36

April, 20May, 31June, 4

TOTAL, 320

Classes ServedSeptember

October

November

December

January

February

March

April

May

June

TOTAL

Program Highlights: Building Partnerships for Learning

TEACHER ~ (Collaborates with school staff analyzing learning and

information needs, locating and using resources that fulfills those needs

and understands and communicates the information the resources provide)

Collaboration and Research Projects (Teachers and Students)

We served 320 class sessions between September 8, 2010 and June 24, 2011 in our

media center. Our peak usage occurred in October 2010 with 53 class sessions. We

did not serve as many classes as we might have, due to the lack of library staff

coverage. Classes occasionally had to be turned away or taught in a shortened time

span because of lack of staffing. The library also occasionally had to be closed to

non-scheduled visitors, such as study hall students, while the library media specialist

was teaching, again, due to lack of staffing.

We operated on a flexible schedule during 2010-11 with library hours of 7:00—3:00

daily. Students were able to visit before and after school and during free periods. We

saw our highest number of student visits during March 2011 with 2,944 student visits.


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Approximately 17,781 students were served by the media center during non-

scheduled class visits in 2010-11.

We continue to see an increase in the quantity and depth of collaborative research

projects with teachers. Several of the projects that we have traditionally done with the

English and Social Studies departments were altered or replaced entirely to reflect a

much more inquiry-based approach. The Science and Business departments

continued to increase their use of the library and its resources, including the librarian,

this school year. We incorporated new tools and technologies into projects whenever

possible. Topics and skills included but were not limited to:

Database instruction

Various presentation tools including Glogster and Fakebook walls

Google News (including News Timeline), Google Scholar, Google

WonderWheel, Google Books

Ethical digital citizenship, including Creative Commons License---what it is and

how to evaluate a license for using a work licensed under this agreement

Video skills with iMovie, Animoto, Moviemaker and PhotoStory

Involvement on School Instruction and Leadership Teams

Amy Carpenter, Technology Core Team

Amy Carpenter, Professional Learning Community Core Team

Amy Carpenter, WSWHE BOCES SLS Communication Coordinator

Amt Carpenter, WSWHE BOCES SLS Council


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Professional Development Trainings and Conferences Attended

New York Library Association/School Library Media Section Carol A. Kearney

Educational Leadership Retreat 2010

WSWHE BOCES School Library System General Membership meeting

Presenter at WSWHE BOCES School Library System Spotlight Professional

Development—Animoto for Educators

Presenter at CASDA Conference for Library Media Specialists and

Administrators

WSWHE BOCES School Library System Communication Coordinators

meetings

WSWHE BOCES SLS Council Meetings

INSTRUCTIONAL PARTNER~ (Identifies curricular content,

learning outcomes and a wide variety of resources for instruction)

Design of authentic learning activities and collaboration/involvement in

meeting subject matter standards

We have continued to work with faculty to incorporate and weave information

literacy skills into New York State Learning Standards through our collaborative

partnerships in all subject areas this year. We have also been investigating the new

Common Core Standards and how to best work within them to continue to make our

students savvy, information literate, digital citizens. We continue to introduce and

support inquiry-based projects both in and out of the library. One fantastic

Participation in Government project this year culminated in Ms. June’s students

writing to our state legislators in support of libraries and library systems. Mrs.

Carpenter had the honor of talking to our legislators and delivering these letters on


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behalf of our students. This is a project that we hope to grow and develop next year,

while we continue to foster inquiry in all classes.

INFORMATION SPECIALIST ~ (Provides leadership and

expertise in acquiring and evaluating information resources in all forma ts

and models for students and staff strategies for locating, accessing and

evaluating information within and beyond the media center)

Technology integration/inclusion in instruction

Technology plays a major role in library instruction at Stillwater Middle/High School.

We continue to tap into the powers of Web 2.0 tools to communicate with our

patrons and to facilitate instruction. Our library web page continues to be popular and

is becoming a first stop for many students working on research.

Use of electronic resources

Downloadable audio books have been very popular this year. We discovered that our

mp3 players were among the top ten most circulated items. These were utilized by

staff and students. While it was anticipated that these players would be heavily used

by our students with special needs, regular education students enjoyed them as well.

Due to the success of this pilot, we have invested in more audio book and EBook

titles that will be exclusively available to our district for the future. We have also

written a grant to purchase additional mp3 players and e-readers to expand upon the

success of this program.

Our databases continue to be invaluable resources of information for our students.

Database access provides our students the opportunity to learn outside of the normal


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school day. Our access to the NOVEL databases provided by New York State and

our paid subscriptions to several other databases through the WSWHE BOCES allow

multiple classes to access material quickly and efficiently, 24/7. We continue to offer

extensive instruction to help students determine how to analyze resources on the free

web to determine what is most useful, authoritative and current for their needs.

Our online information resource purchases are curriculum driven and impacted by

what is being used by our students and staff. Our database subscriptions change

annually to adjust to the changing needs of our school. Due to the increasing

scholarly nature of research projects and the needs of our college-level classes, we

have added the well-respected JSTOR database to our roster for the 2011-12 school

year and look forward to its use.

Our databases continue to be very popular for student research. We compile a list of

useful databases for each class that comes to the library for instruction. After

reviewing usage statistics this year and talking with teachers about changes to projects

in the upcoming year, we have made some changes to our roster, as we do annually.

CultureGrams, American History Online, Thomson Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints and

EBSCO’s Points of View are among our most popular databases. This year we added

ABC-Clio’s World History: Ancient and Medieval Eras and World History: The

Modern Era to better support our curriculum.

We will continue to gather statistics and anecdotal reports from our patrons regarding

which databases best suit their needs and will make future purchases accordingly.


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Circulation Data

Overall, our total circulation remains healthy. We tend to have steady circulation

numbers, with the exception of the month of June, when we try to get most of our

books back for the summer. We ran the numbers by grade this year and were

interested to see that our 6th grade accounts for about 30% of our total circulation

while the 9th, 11th and 12th grades each account for an additional 15%. We were

pleased to see that circulation numbers are approximately evenly split between the

middle school (53%) and the high school (47%). We encourage students to be life-

long readers and are pleased to see that our upper grades are reading. We have

continued to actively solicit input from our students and teachers as we strive to grow

a collection that reflects the needs and interests of our patrons. We also make

excellent use of the interlibrary loan system coordinated by the Washington-Saratoga-

Warren-Hamilton-Essex BOCES School Library System and our interlibrary loan

statistics continue to grow as we make use of the broader collection pool to serve our

patrons.

September, 594October, 945

November, 584

December, 536

January, 796

February, 605

March, 775

April, 776

May, 683June, 320

TOTAL, 6614

Circulation Statistics

September

October

November

December

January

February

March

April

May

June

TOTAL


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Last year we served as a pilot school for the implementation of a new, open-source

library automation system, OPALS. This new system has now been deployed in most

districts in our BOCES and has been very well-received. It is extremely user-friendly,

and all comments from our patrons have been positive.

Ethical use of information in all formats (Teachers and Students)

We used lessons on Bibme.org as a springboard for conversations about the ethical

use of information and intellectual property. In addition, these lessons are a medium

for discussing forms of plagiarism and academic honesty.

We have continued our instruction on Creative Commons Licenses utilizing

Soundzabound, the Search Creative Commons website, Flickr and Google Images

advanced search function.


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PROGRAM ADMINISTRATOR ~ (Collaborative member of

school learning community defining media program policies and activities,

advocate for media program and leader for school’s vision of 21st century

school environment)

Management of media staff, program budget, equipment and facility

Program Budget

Our total budget for the 2010-11 year was $27,277; this amount includes our district

budget and the monies allocated through our BOCES COSER for coordinated

cooperative collection development and database purchases. Our purchases included:

Additional fiction and nonfiction titles requested by students and faculty (more

than 1200 new items including books and audio books)

Two new databases: ABC-Clio’s World History: Ancient and Medieval Eras

and World History: The Modern Era

2010-11 Periodical Subscriptions (more than 60 titles)

Renewal of database access fees for existing databases, including CultureGrams,

World Book Online and Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center

Bookmarks and posters from ALA and other vendors

Media Center Staff

Our media center is staffed by a certified media specialist, Amy Carpenter, MSIS and

one library aides, Carolyn Hayner. Mrs. Carpenter undertakes all teaching

responsibilities, lesson plan design, selection of library materials and administrative

tasks as well as primary responsibility of circulation, passes, and general maintenance

of the library media center commons area. Mrs. Hayner assists with all aspects of

daily operation including maintaining the integrity of the library catalog and is

responsible for clerical work related to the ordering of library materials and book


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processing. Mrs. Hayner also assists with circulation, passes, and general maintenance

of the library media center commons area and is responsible for processing and

repairing books. Her work in these areas is critical as her efforts keep the library

media center running smoothly and efficiently and allow the media specialist more

time to focus on instruction and collaboration. We had a reduction in staffing for the

2010-11 school year, so many additional tasks have been picked up by both Mrs.

Carpenter and Mrs. Hayner. This year we were also ably assisted by a series of

volunteers who were required to complete community service hours for their

Participation in Government classes and for National Honor Society. These students

helped out by shelving books, magazines and other materials, straightening shelves,

running errands and doing other small tasks as assigned. While their help was

invaluable, it did not replace the work formerly performed by the person in the library

aide position that was eliminated for the 2010-11 school year. We strongly

recommend reinstating this position as soon as possible.

Media Center Interns

This year, our library media program hosted two students from SUNY Albany. One

was near the beginning of her degree and simply came to observe our library program

for 25 hours. The other, Alison Lattimore, was nearing the end of her degree

program and was with us as an intern for 150 hours in the spring. Mrs. Lattimore had

the opportunity to work with teachers on collaborative, inquiry-based units, teach

classes, learn about the processes of collection development and maintenance, work

on a grant that was currently being drafted and participate in the day-to-day

operations of our library. Additionally, Mrs. Lattimore was able to travel to Albany

with Mrs. Carpenter to advocate for libraries in early March. While hosting an intern

was an extensive time commitment, we feel that it is important to support and

advocate for school libraries and librarians whenever possible.


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Goals for 2011-2012

Overarching Goal:

To continue to build a program that is exemplary and responsive to the needs of our

learning community.

Future Directions for 2011-12

Continue to build and maintain a collection that is current and reflective of the

school’s curricular needs and achievement goals.

Draft a long-term strategic plan to guide the future direction of the library

media program.

Develop a plan for student assessment in the library media program.

Embrace the digital era and expand our eBook and downloadable audio book

collections

Develop an action plan for creating support and marketing the library media

program within the school community and advocate for school libraries in the

greater community.

Expand the development of collaborative, inquiry-based projects with

additional faculty.

Continued integration of technology and instruction of cloud computing and

Web 2.0 tools for student productivity and content creation.

Development of an up-to-date, comprehensive professional collection for use

by faculty and staff.

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