By Pierre Van Eeckhout
As the dust settles on the Association pour la promotion des services documentaires scolaires (APSDS) Training Days, what remains of our great annual gathering?
E.S.A.R System
With the presentation of Mrs. Rolande Filion, professor of game psychology and co-author of the ESAR system, and Catherine Giguère-Duval, coordinator at the Sainte-Foy game library, I discovered an amazing system, and fun to use in itself, to catalogue games of all kinds.
Composed of psycho-educational descriptors, the ESAR system describes any games using 6 facets. E for exercise game, S for symbolic game, A for assembly games and R for game rules. Stemming from development theories and documentary theories, this system brings together the field of psychology and librarianship in a very original fusion of genres. The manual helps to create the call number in a very detailed way. It is advised to identify shelves and game boxes for easy re-shelving. An inventory card can be associated with the game before loan to ensure that the return of an incomplete game doesn’t go unnoticed.
The library technicians at my Centre de Service Scolaire (CSS) suddenly found that their office was full of games to catalogue. It goes without saying that we will purchase Le Système ESAR. Pour analyser, classifier des jeux et aménager des espaces. Oddly, this manual has not been translated into English yet.
Liaison Committee and School Librarians Expert Committees
From the Department of Education (MEQ), Marie-Hélène Charest gave an overview of the role of the liaison committee, founded in 2017 by the MEQ and made up of nine school librarians representing all regions of Quebec. This committee works to create common practices using four means: a discussion list, a website (still under construction), peered-structured lifelong learning opportunities and expert committees.
Expert committees are created on a voluntary basis. Participants delve into a particular area and commit to sharing their knowledge and expertise for the benefit of the community.
As a reminder, school librarianship received initial support in 2005 with the Plan d’action pour la lecture à l’école (new provincial budgets to buy books year after year), followed by the Plan d’embauche des bibliothécaires scolaires (hiring plan for school librarians) in 2009. The renewal of the school librarianship hiring plan in 2019 will promote the emergence of new expertise in a field that has never been considered specialized, but which is in the process of becoming so. With nearly 2,500 school libraries in Quebec, a hundred information professionals and more than 450 library technicians, all dedicated to promoting literacy in all its forms, the largest laboratory of information science projects has now almost all of the elements needed to have a positive impact on student literacy in our province.
The main long-term objective is to support the development of school information sciences and to provide leadership in the fields of expertise of school librarianship in Quebec for the benefit of our students.
Marie-Hélène introduced each of the committees and their chair. Some committees are already active, including the information literacy committee and the one on learning commons. Ten more committee are being prepared, including the committee on collections and children’s literature, the one on cultural development, and the committee on inventory and statistics, among others. I bet we will hear more and more from these expert committees in the coming months and years.
Naomi Lebel, chair of the information literacy committee, and Yannick Caza, library technician at the Saint-Hyacinthe School Board, made a detailed presentation of the results of their work, which culminated in the Information Literacy Continuum site. The Continuum has been validated by the Multimodal Research Literacy Group and the RÉCITs.
The Information Literacy Continuum will help mark out students learning, in accordance to their grade level. The four information skills are: defining an information need, searching efficiently, analyzing the information, and using it ethically. Yannick Caza concluded by eloquently demonstrating the usefulness of these skills in the Programme d’éducation international, in the Arts and History Class in seventh grade, in Personal Projects of eleventh grade and more. It was also very enlightening to see how the Continuum can be used all through the K-12 curriculum. Finally, a video promoting the Continuum can be found here.
How can we improve the online presence of the school library?
It is imperative for the school library to make its presence and importance felt in person and online. What are the relevant tools to help librarians in their task? Amélie Lafleur-Savage took it upon herself to draw a portrait for us.
Here are goals that are an integral part of our work: regularly create engaging content on social networks, ensure a positive image of the online library, inform teachers, school administrators and students of the metamorphosis and progress of the library, and increase the number of access points to reach a larger public. To achieve this, a dizzying number of tools are now available to us: for example, the free online software Canva for making posters, flyers, inserts. Social networks like Facebook and Instagram to engage our users.
Some skills have become essential: bonding with colleagues and talking to students on social networks; knowing how to use hashtags; the art of tagging people to attract attention; and the use of stories and emojis to illustrate the full range of our emotions with Emojipedia.
Knowing how to schedule our content in advance saves time and keeps your library online even when you are not. Finally, you must also become familiar with free images and sounds repositories, or with Google Sites to create a site, depending on your needs.
I am still astonished by all the tools at our disposal. I have still to explore Creator Studio, Linktree, and so on. With all of these tools, we are only limited by our imagination!
An Historic AGM
A word on the Annual General Meeting, where a brand new board of directors was elected. Ariane Régnier, librarian at Val-des-Cerfs School Board, became president during the first elections to take place in recent memory. The other members of the board are Marjolaine Séguin (CSSMI), as vice-president, Myriam Leclerc (CSSMI) as treasurer, and Geneviève Paquin (CSDM) as secretary. Congratulations to the new board of directors!
Copibec / Socan license
Francis M. Desmarais, liaison officer, K-12 sector at Copibec , Martin Lavallée, senior lawyer at SOCAN (music section), Geneviève Leblanc, in charge of copyright matters at the Quebec Department of Education (MEQ) and Gilles Lessard, SOCAN department head (visual arts and fine crafts) played the question-and-answer game led by Lyne Rajotte of CSSMI School Board. Here is what I learned from their intense and insightful exchange in six points:
- The agreement between Copibec and the Department is not an agreement on the actual use of documents in schools. It is an agreement representing the use that schools might make of documents. It seeks to establish fair remuneration for artists.
- Unlike the use of interactive whiteboard in class or with distant learning, the ban on Facebook and other social networks use is mainly rooted in a need to protect children from advertising and other influences.
- Classroom use of online TV is subject to the same rules as use of websites.
- The right of exception (fair use) does not take precedence over the various Canadian, Quebec, Copibec and Socan laws.
- The Copibec directory really exists and can be found in our Copibec account at the top left in the form of a search engine that can be searched by author, title, ISBN or publisher!
- A reasonable time frame for an answer to a teacher request is a week and a “no answer” is not a refusal, but it should be considered as such. You need a positive answer to be able to start reproducing materials according to law.
Round Tables
Three round tables, one on censorship, the other on the relevance of collecting late fees and a last on library role in dealing with robotics, digital tablets, laptops and other have allowed members to express themselves on these different subjects in a timed atmosphere that encouraged conciseness and an analytical mind. Nice initiative and relevant exchanges!
Biblius
Finally, Nancy Lusignan, project manager for Biblius at Bibliopresto closed these training days by presenting what has been achieved since February 2019, and the developments in progress in order to better prepare the full deployment of Biblius (a service equivalent to OverDrive, geared towards school libraries only), for the next school year. New developments are to be expected. Stay tuned!
In conclusion, this event allowed all participants to enjoy their training days despite the restrictions related to the pandemic. The virtual formula has attracted many people to sign up, some for the first time. Despite the physical distance, we were still able to get together and experience enriching and dynamic days. Perhaps a hybrid virtual and face-to-face formula could rally a greater number of participants in the future? One thing is for sure, thanks to the high number of participants, the training days have given some financial leeway to the next Board of Directors.
Hope to see each and every one of you in person next year!
Pierre Van Eeckhout worked for public libraries in Quebec between 1996 and 2000 and in New Brunswick from 2003 to 2014 (NBPLS). In 2015, he made a transition to school libraries with De-l’Or-et-des-Bois School Board in Abitibi. He is APSDS past president (2018-2020) and a member of the Provincial School Librarian Liaison Committee. He seeks all kinds of innovative ways to transmit his passion for reading to the new generation of students.