By Sandra Bebbington
The Quebec School Librarian’s Network (QSLiN) has been working hard over the past few years to promote school libraries as valuable partners in education. With budget cuts forever looming, and education constantly evolving, QSLiN felt it was important to launch a campaign that helped share all the valuable things that school libraries have to offer, as well as our contribution to student and school success, with various stakeholders and members of the educational community.
Many school libraries have seen a reduction in the number of staff hours allotted to each school while others have seen wonderful updates and renovations to help transform libraries into engaging learning environments. We decided it was important to showcase what we do, where we do it, how we do it and why we do it!
For the past three years we have been visiting school libraries around the province, recording all sorts of libraries – from small rural libraries run by parent volunteers to large suburban libraries that have taken technology to heart, and everything in between! We called these QSLiN Library Hangouts. The added bonus to this advocacy campaign is that each video also helps to inspire other library personnel and other stakeholders to perhaps make changes in their school library. QSLiN also holds a yearly conference for school library personnel and their educational partners and there we launched a #LibrariesMatter campaign where various people from the community share why the library is so important to both school and student success.
Below are a few of the videos that have been made. We hope that this will inspire you to launch similar campaigns, collect evidence of the wonderful and successful things going on in your school libraries and share them with your educational community. Share them with us as well! We can all learn from each other, grow together and be stronger. Combined, our voices can move mountains, create change and contribute to the educational success of our students across the country!
PCHS Creating Zones in the Library
Harmony Elementary School Library Goes Dewey Less
Alexander Galt Bistro Library
#LibrariesMatter Joanne Henrico, Principal
#LibrariesMatter Maureen Baron, ICT Consultant
#LibrariesMatter – Anne Marie Roy, Bibliothécaire/Librarian
#LibrariesMatter – Olivier Hamel, Bibliothécaire/Librarian
Sandra Bebbington is a librarian and educator by day and a student by night. For ten years her focus has been information literacy, digital citizenship, education technology, gamification and library learning commons. For the past 6 years, Sandra has been the project manager for two dossiers at the Ministry of Education-English Sector Services (Québec, Canada): Information Literacy and Digital Citizenship. She has also co chaired the Quebec School Librarians Network (QSLiN). She has presented (virtually and in person), to both adults and children, at various schools, boards, universities and conferences in Canada and the U.S.