Beautiful British Columbia, filled with mountains, lakes, rivers, canyons and great ideas. For the last 46 years the British Columbia Teacher-Librarian Association (BCTLA), a professional specialist association of the BC Teacher Federation (BCTF), has run an annual working and learning conditions survey to understand trends and changes in teacher-librarianship within the province. The data from this survey proved instrumental in the BCTF’s win at the Supreme Court of Canada after workers’ rights were stripped from the collective agreement in 2001.
In 2024, in preparation for Treasure Mountain Canada 8, CSL decided to survey Canadian school library staff to try and build a picture of what was happening across Canada. For years CSL had relied on its provincial library association liaisons to understand what the state of school libraries were. However, as those associations began to fold due to changes in staffing and other external pressures the ability to find out what was happening disappeared. Those holes inspired us to seek a solution, and BC already had the idea.
Our first attempt, CSL’s School Library Learning Commons Access and Human Resources Survey, tried to do many things and was put together in a hurry. It lacked coherence for analyzing the data and required a lot of time manually assessing the answers to find out what we were trying to understand. This time we have spent time considering each question and how we will use data science to properly examine the results. We considered what we wanted to know and the best way to create comparisons. Part of this was due to having access to the BCTLA’s questions. They had spent years refining them. If you are from BC, you will recognize a lot of the questions (and in fact do not have to do it, your data is provided in aggregate from the BCTLA).
One of the largest issues last year was that we tried to have both responses at a district level and at an individual school level, but did not anticipate how to compare them properly. Furthermore, we had not considered properly how to compare data from provinces with different language for positions, and different ways of doing things. Failure is a teacher of its own kind, and while last year it was difficult to get the data out of the questions, we learned how we should have worded things. We missed crucial factors like being able to differentiate between public and private schools, as well as forgetting to ask what province the school was in.
The 146 responses we received in the 1st survey, provided us a picture that demonstrated that the decline in school librarianship is ongoing and prevalent across most of Canada. As we move forward, this annual data collection should provide us with a longitudinal picture, and one we can share with advocates within the provinces and territories. Canada’s provincial-federal split of issues can be one of its greatest strengths and also its greatest weakness. Education being under provincial jurisdiction allows provinces to tailor their system to the needs of the students they have, but it also creates a divide between provinces that are investing in education and those that are not. This is even more stark when we consider those that are investing in school librarianship and those for whom it is an after thought or, worse, an inconvenience.
This year we are trying to focus on key areas and illuminate them. One area we have chosen to focus on is budgets. According to BookNet Canada’s Sales Data the average juvenile hardcovers are now $23.46 for fiction and $24.92 for non-fiction, rising to $28.35 for YA fiction and $51.22 for YA non-fiction. In the data BCTLA provided budgets have largely stagnated in the province, despite the increasing cost of books. By gathering this year-on-year data we hope to be able to provide a better picture of budgetary changes in relation to the cost of books.
As a national organization, we work with all provinces and territories and have the ability to build on these kinds of large data initiatives. If we are to reverse this trend diminishing the importance of school librarianship and eroding the profession, we need to work on helping people understand what we do, as well as proving that there is a problem and that things can be done differently. This survey falls into that latter category. We hope that you will participate, share and encourage others to participate. The more data points we have the easier it is to understand what we are seeing and begin to draw correlations and conclusions from this data.
The survey can be found here and will be open until May 10th, 2026.