By Joseph Jeffery
Background Information
In 2024-2025, following the BC Teacher-Librarian Association conference in Victoria, BC, the School District 57 – Prince George District Learning Commons was approached by a principal and two teacher-librarians with a challenge. The two TLs had just experienced a presentation from Lisa Seddon and Sarah Wethered about ditching Dewey. They wanted to attempt it as part of their Standard 9 growth plan. In our school district we had been asked to consider the newly implemented Standard 9 of our professional standards as part of our yearly growth plans. Standard 9 for those outside BC states that “Educators respect and value the history of First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada and the impact of the past on the present and the future. Educators contribute towards truth, reconciliation and healing. Educators foster a deeper understanding of ways of knowing and being, histories, and cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis” (BC Ministry of Education, 2019, p. 5). For Sarah and Lisa working within decentralized catalogs, they could easily change their own catalog, they also were in a district with a single nation whose band office was in Sarah’s school. The reality of our district was very different. We have a central catalog. We have three nations geographically spread out. It would have been easy to say no, but that’s not the way we work. Acts of reconciliation are often hard, take a long time and are slow. Education got us into this, it needs to lead us out.
System change is not easy to envision. It feels slow and there are many consultation points required. There’s a wish to ‘just have it done’ that pushes to go fast, but if you spin the wheel hard starboard while going top speed you’re going to end up capsizing. Trying to conceive of change that will take 5-10 years for a full implementation is daunting.
Starting out
We began with the school that had requested to work on this change. What was their vision? How did they see it being achieved? At first we thought we would just work with them as a test case, but it quickly became apparent that doing that would mean having to redo work as we brought new people in. It was going to be better to plan this out and bring people together and do this properly. Measure thrice, cut once.
The next step became looping our Indigenous education department in and finding out how involved they and the nations wanted to be. Within our district we have advisory tables made up of representatives from the nations that meet monthly. The answer we got back was that we could proceed and then bring things to them before implementation to make sure it would work for them. They did not have the capacity to be there along the way, but they trusted our previous work and consultation and felt we could go on alone and then come back once we were ready.
Work behind the scenes
Ditching Dewey, sure, but for what? We understood why we might want to ditch Dewey. We had been making incremental changes already. We had changed our cataloging rules that used to put books into 971 (Canada) to instead honour the subject matter over the hierarchy of Dewey. Therefore a book about Lheidli T’enneh governance (one of our local nations) would instead go into 321 (Systems of Governance), just like a book on the Canadian parliamentary system would. We had updated our subject headings to remove things like ‘Indians of North America’ and replace it with ‘Indigenous Peoples of North America’. However, at the core this was all still Dewey Decimal. New Westminster Secondary and Queensborough Middle School under Sarah and Lisa had moved to a Brian Deer cataloging system. Was that the right choice for us? With the go-ahead from our partners in the indigenous education department we began to look at our options.
Library of Congress classification was discounted as it was too complicated for most younger students. It also had similar problems to Dewey and felt more like a lateral move than an act of decolonization and reconciliation. Brian Deer was created by an Indigenous person and radically changed how things were organized, but its way of organizing information from local outwards means that there’s no uniformity to the schemas between organizations, and tools like OCLC WorldCat or Bookware are not going to be able to help with deciding on location. BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communication) was too geared towards fiction. With all this, the only one that made sense for our needs was Brian Deer, but it would not be without significant overhead.
We had reached a significant decision point. We could ask all our TLs to vote on the system, but it would require them to read a large amount of background material that we had collected and examined. This did not seem like a viable option. We decided that we would move ahead with Brian Deer. We still needed to communicate with our teacher-librarians around this, and to do that we would need a concrete plan, and anticipate any issues that might arise.
Making and Communicating a Plan
Every September, to coincide with Truth and Reconciliation day, our district uses their one non-instructional day that is controlled by district administration as the indigenous day of learning. As part of the Curriculum and Innovation department, the District Learning Commons worked to invite Lisa and Sarah to introduce Brian Deer in the morning and then in the afternoon we would present what we were planning to do.
Our communication plan had to be robust and make it clear we were talking about a slow, multi-year, multi-phase project. The last time our school district attempted something on this scale it was the implementation of the learning commons model. There were only three of us who were teacher-librarians during that time, and two of us were now district teacher-librarians.
At the outset we set some caveats to help guide discussion. These are taken directly from my communication plan:
- We do not expect anything to change in the catalog for several years. My earliest projection on this project if everything goes according to plan is 2028-29 school year would be where we would begin looking at work in schools.
- There are going to be multiple touch points and consultations along the way for this. None of this is a done-deal. We are at the earliest stages of saying, we value this idea and want to pursue it as a district.
We also had to be cognizant that few of our teacher-librarians, even if they had training, had cataloging experience or course-work. That meant we would need to explain a lot of terms like schemas, cutter codes, and so on. When you create a communication plan, it is important to follow it. There’s a reason for the order in it. I ignored my own instructions and ended up trying to explain terms before I went over the plan and ended up confusing people.
The Plan:
- Step 1: Determine scope of project
Who is involved: Everyone
During this step we will, collectively, be deciding the best scope for this project. Do we include all schools or just high schools (which breaks the unified catalog)? Do we just do indigenous resources? Do we go backwards and re-do old items or only forward and implement as we get new items?
Determining the breadth and depth of the project allows us to understand what we are doing exactly and helps us forward plan. - Step 2: Determine the Schema
Who is involved: Everyone
After we have determined how far the project extends we then need to begin thinking about how the schema will work. This involves the ‘schema comparison’ found in the Files of this channel. We will need to make sure that each non-fiction book has a place, but also that we are not just doing a 1:1 mapping of Dewey as that defeats the purpose and just replaces numbers with letters. This is the largest pre-implementation section and will require the most thought and consultation. We will be working with Curriculum to see if there’s release time or ways to meet to do this work together. - Step 3: Test the Schema
Who is involved: One high school TL, one elementary TL, DLC TL
Once the schema is in a shape we are largely happy with, we begin testing it. We will be pulling books at one high school and one elementary school semi-randomly and making sure each has a place within the schema. Any issues during this point make us relook at the schema again. - Step 4: Verify the Schema
Who is involved: DLC staff
The DLC team will sit down and talk through whether the schema is viable for implementation and what we need on our end to make it work, including discussing time commitment, slowdown from a new system, and many other pieces we will need to consider. - Step 5: Consultation with Indigenous Ed
Who is involved: DLC Staff and Indigenous Ed
The schema would go to Indigenous Education for discussion with the nations. They will determine if they think it works. While it would be great to have someone along for the ride helping us every step of the way, the reality is there is not enough staff to do this. We have already discussed with them the best way to do this implementation and this is what we decided on. - Step 6: Begin work on implementation
Who is involved: Schools as they feel they have capacity, DLC as and when we have capacity
Schools would be chosen as they feel ready to do this work once we get here. As stated previously this is likely 3+ years away at minimum. We are not looking for volunteers until we get close.
We look forward to communicating our status on this project in the future.
References
BC Ministry of Education. (2019). Professional standards for BC educators. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/education/kindergarten-to-grade-12/teach/teacher-regulation/standards-for-educators/edu_standards.pdf
Joseph Jeffery is the District Learning Commons Teacher-Librarian in School District 57 – Prince George, BC where he supports teacher-librarians in creating and maintaining information literacy rich library learning commons programming, designing participatory and flexible learning spaces, and developing culturally responsive library learning commons. Joseph has worked on the Collection Diversity Toolkit, the updates to Leading Learning, and the Foundations and Frameworks document. Additionally, he helped write the BC Teacher Librarian Association’s School Library Design document. Outside of school, Joseph is an avid gamer of all types from card to tabletop to video games and enjoys being transported to imaginative worlds of science fiction and fantasy as a reader.