By Patricia Sarles
Introduction
In Canada, there is a document called Foundations for School Library Learning Commons in Canada: A Framework for Success. Although we have similar type documents put forth by the American Library Association (ALA) in the United States, we do not have anything that outlines what a Library Learning Commons (LLC) Leadership Team is, what we in the States would call a Library Advisory Committee or a Library Advisory Council. Although American librarians have published articles about the importance of having a team of library leaders who strengthen and inform the role of the library and give gravitas to the role of the librarian within the school (Dawkins, 2023; Harper and Schwelik, 2013; Pickett, 2013; Sarles and Ellner Krim, in press), there is no official source from the ALA about these very important bodies and how, especially, they can be a vital component of the school library program. Therefore, Canadian librarians are fortunate to have such a document.
In New York City Public Schools, where I work, we have a grant program called VITAL, which stands for Vital, Instructional, Transformative, Accessible, Learning Libraries. New York City public school librarians can apply for a $50,000 grant for their individual school libraries in exchange for creating a sustainable school library program by way of forming a Library Advisory Committee, known in Canada as an LLC Leadership Team. Each year, once the grant winners are announced, the VITAL Libraries grant program managers meet on a regular basis with the winning schools to help their Advisory Committees take shape. We require the school’s administration to be on the committee and we require that the librarian organize a few teachers to be on the committee as well. Parent Coordinators, students, the district librarian, a local public librarian, and the custodian are also bonus members.
Educating our VITAL Libraries grant winners what to do during the meetings was up to the VITAL Libraries grant program managers. Did they know what they are, how to run them, who to invite, and what to discuss? After all, Advisory Committees are a great advocacy tool for school librarians who may be the only ones in their building who do what they do. Advisory Committees provide an opportunity to share with colleagues, students, and administrators the work that librarians do, as well as to get others in the community involved with the school library program.
What do Advisory Committees do exactly? What are some activities they perform? What do they talk about? How can each of the members find their voice on the Advisory Committee? Below is a list of activities that school library committee members can perform during the Advisory Committee meetings. If you have ever wondered, “What do Advisory Committees do?,” here are some suggestions for having successful and productive meetings.
What is an Advisory Committee?
An Advisory Committee is a group of stakeholders who have a vested interest in the library and its central role, function, and purpose in the school. The Advisory Committee meets regularly (four to five times a year) and works closely with administrators, faculty, staff, and students to conceptualize library services for the school community. All told, having a “team of voices” (Cravey, 2013) involved goes a long way in winning over the hearts and minds of the community you serve. This team of voices also supports and strengthens the role of the school librarian as the librarian strives to support and strengthen student learning within the school. Additionally, if ever your job is in jeopardy, you will have plenty of support from your committee members.
One thing we recommend our VITAL Libraries grant applicants do prior to writing the grant is to form a committee and work on the grant jointly. If you are a winner, you will meet with your Advisory Committee weekly, instead of quarterly, to come up with a vision and mission statement and to discuss how the VITAL funds will be spent to reimagine and revitalize the library facility and the library program. The VITAL Libraries grant program requires that a mission and vision statement be developed prior to working on the budget for how the grant funds are to be spent so that all purchased items are tied to the vision and mission of the school library program.
Developing a Mission and Vision Statement
This is the Advisory Committee’s first order of business. What is your future vision for the school library program? What is your program’s current mission? The Advisory Committee should come up with these statements before they begin to put together the VITAL budget. Each dollar spent, and each item selected, must correspond with the vision and mission statements. But first, it is important to distinguish the two. The mission statement is about what you currently do in your library program. Is your mission to create a welcoming environment and you do that already? Is it your mission to serve every class in the building and you do that already? Is it your mission to provide a balanced collection and you do that already? Is the mission to stay open before and after school and you do that already? Then what is the vision? The vision is what you hope to do with your library program. Is the vision to have a class set of laptops so that each student can practice the skills you teach during a lesson? Is the vision to provide more soft seating or quiet areas of study? Is the vision to create a makerspace? Is the vision to provide more flexible spaces for small meetings or collaborations? Is the vision to create special collections for graphic novels, manga, or social-emotional learning? For the VITAL grant, we require that our winning librarians focus on their vision and use the funds to align with the vision. It is also important to note that the school library program’s vision and mission be aligned with the school’s vision and mission (Kachel, 2017; Keeling, 2013). What are the principal’s goals for the school and how can the school library support those goals (Foundations…, 2023; Moving Forward, n.d.)? This is why having an administrator on the committee is so essential. The school library program is only as vital to the school community as it supports the overall vision, mission, and goals of the school leader and the school at large. When the school library program’s mission is tied to the school’s mission, (most often related to student academic achievement), you are demonstrating that the school library program’s purpose is, indisputably, there to support the community, and most importantly the academic success of the students.
Creating a Needs Assessment
After creating the vision and mission statements, the next thing the librarian and their committee should do is conduct a needs assessment. A needs assessment is a survey of your staff, students, and administrators on what they want to see in a library serving their school community. Do they want laptops or desktops or both? Does the library need a wireless infrastructure? Do they want more inquiry learning classes? Would they prefer a bigger Promethean board? Do they want to see more mysteries in the book collection? Do they want soft seating? Do they want more staff development workshops on how to use the library for research, use databases, or find books? Do they want to have different spaces in the library, like a quiet study area, and/or more collaborative spaces for small meetings and mini-lessons? Do the students want a makerspace? Do they want the library open before and after school? Ask yourself, what services or programs would the school community miss if they no longer existed (Sannwald, 2021)? We suggest to our VITAL Libraries grant applicants that they should ask these questions before they write the VITAL Libraries grant so the grant committee reading the VITAL applications has a clearer understanding of how the grant application and their library, as a potential winner, will transform the school library program and the school community.
Creating a Patron Satisfaction Survey
A patron satisfaction survey is different from a needs assessment. A patron satisfaction survey asks your staff and students what they like and don’t like about the library facility and program that is already offered. Librarians can list the resources and programs already offered to see if and how these impact their staff and students. The patron satisfaction survey can ask questions like: Do you find the library accessible, whether academically or physically? Do you find the librarian(s) approachable? Is the book collection adequate? Are there enough books or not enough books? If not, what would you like to see in the collection? Do you like the seating in the library? If not, what would you change? Do you like the menu of classes provided? Are you able to find the information you are looking for? If not, how can we better serve you? Is the OPAC easy to use? Is the technology in the library adequate? Do you prefer the digital or the print books collection? This is where librarians list what the library already offers and ask specific questions about each item.
Developing a Strategic Plan
What is a strategic plan? A strategic plan is a planning document that outlines a path to improve the library and its programs, facility, collections, and anything else identified that needs improvement (Wong, 2012). Strategic plans are also driven by your mission and vision statements (Keeling, 2013). Once you have completed a needs assessment and a patron satisfaction survey, which will inform your service and practice, you can create a strategic planning document in order to establish a path to improvement, keeping in mind always that the plan should align with the principal’s plans for the school. A librarian may have a strategic plan to develop the graphic novel collection, keep the library open before and after school, provide more programming, help to improve student test scores with more information literacy instruction, introduce digital citizenship lessons, obtain grant funds for additional resources, or provide more workshops for teachers on database use, for example. Strategic plans are both short and long-range documents. What do you want to see from the library this year? What do you want to see from the library in five years? These planning documents should be developed with the administration’s goals in mind and most importantly, with student growth and learning in mind. Why is this important? You have to know where you want to go in order to get there and having a planning document can be your guide.
Evaluating the Program Through Action Research and Literature Review Study
Librarians are consummate researchers who can find just about any piece of information they are seeking anywhere where information is stored. If the committee would like more information about library practices such as collaboration, technology integration, grant writing, collecting data, library advocacy, information and digital literacy instruction, reader’s advisory, or anything else related to library practices and services, the librarian can find books and articles that address these issues. Print or digital copies can be shared, the committee can read them, and then the committee can discuss them during their meetings. This is one way that the librarian can share best practices in the library and aim to meet the desired standards set by the school leader, and a team of professionals, of a great school library program.
Action research is another tool that can be used to evaluate the school library program. Is the school library program good or just good enough? Action research is useful for spearheading strategic planning and the overall evolution of the school library program. It can be qualitative or quantitative. Action research considers the inputs in order to measure the outcomes. For example, is the outcome that the purchase of the new laptops is increasing student learning and engagement during and after a database lesson? Did the new laptops make an impact? How can we measure this? Some project ideas include evaluating students’ digital literacy skills before instruction and then after instruction; evaluating their database skills both before and after instruction; quantifying the frequency, types, and genres of books that circulate and then tailoring the collection to match those circulation statistics. Is increased circulation the outcome?; assessing the value of a book club after school; measuring the impact and feasibility of email newsletters to students, faculty, and families; reviewing the furniture layout of the library and making changes according to findings about student likes and dislikes; evaluating information literacy instruction and making adjustments based on student feedback about it’s utility and effectiveness. These are just a few examples of action research projects that a librarian can conduct, but what could be more meaningful than an action research project conducted and published by a team of library stakeholders as opposed to just the librarian? Action research is a way to regularly measure a school library program’s effectiveness to maximize its benefits and, most importantly, make sure it complements and advances its own pedagogical goals and the goals of the school community.
Collecting Data Connecting the School Library Program to Student Academic Achievement
Student academic achievement is what it’s all about. It is the reason there are libraries in schools. After all, the librarian serves as a liaison between the student and their education. If the student wants to know more about photosynthesis or ancient civilizations, monkeys or human evolution, where do they go? They can go to the school library to read more about something they learned in class that piqued their interest. What a luxury this is! And what a sin to the child who has no school library. But, if you are reading this, your students do have a library! So how does your school library impact student academic achievement? As schools with school libraries have proven to be catalytic for student academic achievement, including increased test scores, (Lance and Kachel, 2013; Lance and Kachel, 2018), how can librarians collect data on student academic achievement and connect it back to library programs and instruction? How many collaborations did you engage in in the past year? What were the outcomes of the students’ final projects? Chances are the student projects required research. You should assess the students’ work alongside the classroom teacher to see how the resources you taught for the project were utilized. Are students citing articles from the databases you taught? Or are they resorting to the results in a Google search? What did you teach and how was it applied to the project? If what you taught during the collaboration was incorporated into the project, how well did the student follow instructions? Did the end product make sense? Did what you taught improve the project outcomes? You should know if your teaching was successful.
Reviewing Student Work
After a collaboration with the teacher, it is a good idea to meet with the teachers to go over the results of student work in an attempt to connect it with your collaborative efforts. Have the students met your instructional goals and the instructional goals of the teacher? Have they shown mastery of the database(s) you taught them? Do they know how and when to cite properly? Was there any plagiarism? Have they shown an effort to produce new knowledge? How much was the print collection utilized? How much were the databases used? By examining student work, you will be able to see firsthand if what you taught remained with them during the course of their carrying out their assignment. You and your Advisory Committee can also review other student work that is not connected to your instruction in order to examine whether there are gaps that could be filled by the librarian collaborating with the teachers who tend not to bring their classes to the library.
Preparing the Library Budget
Every school library in New York State gets a budget for library books. How are you spending these funds? Although the school librarian is trained in how to do collection development, you and your Advisory Committee can collectively decide how to spend the budget. The librarian can gain further insights from the teachers on the committee on what they are teaching in the classroom and manage print and digital purchases around those conversations. Likewise, the school leader on the committee may want to focus on social-emotional learning this year and would like the library to start a section in the library for such books, or at least have them in the collection. Or it might be that the social studies teachers will be introducing debates this year and you know that the Opposing Viewpoints database would be the perfect tool for them to use for their research. Or that the AP Literature teachers need the Literature Resource Center database so that their students have the literary criticism they need to do advanced research papers. You, the librarian, know best what students’ reading tastes are, but working with the committee is a great way to make sure that the budget is spent optimally and befittingly for student and staff consumption of the books and databases in the collection.
Designing Collection Development Policies Based on the School’s Curricula and Student-Self-Selected Reading for Pleasure
Every school library should have a collection development policy. If the librarian has not yet developed their own, they can use the one developed by the New York City School Library System. As mentioned earlier, school libraries exist to support the curriculum and to facilitate student learning, inquiry, creativity, and curiosity. The librarian should therefore be familiar with all curricula taught in the school for every subject and should know the best resources to support those curricula. Here is where the Advisory Committee can be instrumental. With teachers from various curricular areas who have a greater insight into their curriculum than anyone else, their knowledge can be invaluable to the librarian. The librarian, in turn, is the expert on students’ reading tastes and book trends in the library and knows therefore what the students want to read and can share this with the committee. A collection development policy can take shape from these two areas of expertise.
Implementing Strategies for Collaboration Between Librarian and Faculty
Collaboration is key to the librarian’s success within the school. How well teacher-librarian collaborations go goes a long way in how the librarian is perceived as a fellow instructional partner and colleague. Librarians are teachers but they are best utilized when in a supporting yet strengthening role. After all, they are the only people in the building who can teach what they teach. Teachers teach content. Librarians teach skills by way of that content. Teachers and librarians collaborating together is a powerful combination of skills and combined knowledge and collaboration should be happening on a regular basis. Is it? Is it not? Your Advisory Committee can help you get the word out about what the librarian has to offer in the way of an instructional and mutually beneficial partnership. Remember to keep track of who you worked with, the subjects and topics taught, grade levels, and the number of students reached. Perform formative assessments such as exit tickets (Owen and Sarles, 2012), to see where students are deficient and where they have benefited from your instruction. Having exit tickets filled out by the students are also a great way to capture student voices about their learning in the library. This evidence will be important information to share in your annual report at the end of the year.
Advocating for the School Library Program
You cannot advocate alone! And you cannot be the only voice for the library. Turn your Advisory Committee members and library users into your loudest and most vociferous library proponents. After all, the library belongs to EVERYONE. If the future of the school library program is ever in danger, an Advisory Committee will be the cheerleading squad you will need in trying to save it. You will not be the lone voice speaking up for your program and for the students who need the program. You’ll have an entire committee of teachers, administrators, and students who will speak up for the program with you. If ever there is one reason to have an Advisory Committee, this is it. Get the “movers and shakers” in the school on your side!
Doing a Collection Analysis and Diversity Audit
Collection analyses are easy. Both Mackin and Follet allow you to export your collection and will do an analysis of your collection to see how many fiction books vs. nonfiction books you have; how many print vs. digital; how many diverse titles you have; how many titles related to social-emotional learning you have, how many items on each grade level or reading level there are, plus recommendations for what to weed, etc. Your committee and you can then discuss where there are gaps that need to get filled with the library budget.
A diversity audit is a bit more complicated and time-consuming. The librarian must examine how many of their books are diverse and how the collection matches up to the demographics of the student body. If your school is 30% Black, 30% Asian, and 30% Hispanic, for example, doing a diversity audit will allow you to see if your collection is representative of the 90% of the heterogeneous students in your school. The collection analysis and diversity audit will help you ensure that your collection is diverse and representative of the students you serve.
Integrating Technology
Technology is indispensable to the school library program. Indeed, it is indispensable in today’s information economy. Although books are still very much a source of knowledge building, using technology, and knowing how to use it, is a must in today’s world. Many resources, if not most, previously in print, are now digital. It is therefore crucial that the librarian, and their students, have access to technology, both to teach with and to learn with. When the librarian teaches their students how to use a database, or how to use the Web with precision, it is important that the students be able to practice the skills they learn immediately after instruction, and with their own device, meaning that they do not have to share a laptop or a Chromebook with another student. Practice is key to mastering databases and other digital literacy skills. And if you don’t have the technology needed to do these things, your Advisory Committee will be the “team of voices” that can help you obtain the necessary technology for the students who use the library. After all, it is not so much about having the technology as it is about how the technology will enable the learning of the digital and informational skills that the students need (Canadian School Libraries, 2023).
Writing Grants
Once our librarians have won the VITAL Libraries program grant, they should not consider this the first and last grant they ever write even though it is quite a substantial amount of money. Finding funding to ensure the continued success of the school library program is important to continuing to carry out the library’s mission and vision. Grant writing is another one of the activities the Advisory Committee can do. When writing grants, you and your committee can use the results of your needs assessment to consider the students’ academic needs. Their needs and how they fit into your overall mission are paramount in successful grant writing. How will the grant money transform learning for the students? How will it transform your program? You should also take into account your library’s strategic plan and your vision for the program. If you have already completed many of the activities outlined here so far, you are on your way to achieve your grant writing goals because you can take language from your strategic plan, vision and mission statements, needs assessment, patron satisfaction survey, and other already written policies to write your grant narrative. Writing grants is time-consuming but with the help of the committee, it could be less onerous. After all, everyone on the committee is committed to the success of the library and the more funding, the better!
Responding to Challenged Materials
Book challenges happen when a reader, usually a parent, objects to the content of a book. Their objections could be based on sexual content, LGBTQ content, or whatever they deem offensive. A librarian’s job is to purchase books that the students will enjoy, that will excite their interest in reading, that will console, comfort, inspire, and uplift them. And as librarian, Mary Jo Godwin, has stated, “A really good library has something in it to offend everyone.” It is the librarian’s duty to have a broad collection of books that they carefully select based on professional reviews and that would appeal to the broadest audience possible among the population they serve. Therefore, it would be surprising if there was something that didn’t offend someone. Books should represent all kinds of people and all kinds of human experiences and subjects. It is therefore imperative that the librarian try to reach everyone while at the same time it is impossible to please everyone. If the librarian is ever faced with a book challenge, it is critical to have a collection development policy to refer to. You and your Advisory Committee can read it together to become familiar with it ahead of a challenge, or if you don’t already have one, you and your committee can create one together. If and when a challenge arises, your Advisory Committee will be able to back you up as previous discussions might have centered around book purchases. You might have already educated your committee members on how book purchases are made. The committee also stands ready to be on your materials review committee. Members can volunteer to read the book and be ready to discuss the merits and demerits of the book in order to be prepared for when the materials review committee meets with the person who objected to the book.
Preparing the Agenda for the Next Advisory Committee Meeting
Having an agenda for every meeting is important and so is taking minutes. Your committee members are busy with their many other roles in the school so they deserve to know what will be discussed at the committee meeting. The first agenda can include introductions and thank yous for the people who showed up to support the library and each subsequent agenda can be based on the new ideas discussed at the most recent meeting. School staff are busy so they appreciate a rich and generative meeting and will walk away feeling good that they have contributed to something productive.
Creating the Annual Report
School libraries are so much more than the books on the shelves. They are organic and evolving entities that constantly adjust to the needs of their communities. The book collection evolves, the programming evolves, the instruction adapts as changes occur in the information landscape, and the librarian adjusts to improvements in the profession. How do we establish all of that in a single, brief snapshot? Annual reports are another advocacy tool and a way to present evidence of best practices in your role as the school’s librarian. The annual report should provide a glimpse of how exactly the library program is influencing and impacting student learning in the school and how it is accountable for student academic achievement. It is also a showcase of the distinct contributions the librarian makes to the school community. Annual reports are where you can show growth over the school year and brag about your accomplishments and the happenings in the library. Keep in mind though that you want to share only the things that will resonate most with your stakeholders: your administrators, teachers, the superintendent, and the VITAL grant committee. And usually what resonates most is what the students are learning, applying, creating, discovering, and exploring. After all, there is so much more transpiring in the library than book checkouts and circulation statistics.
Connect the annual report to your mission and vision and the strategic plan. Document the services, information literacy instruction, reading advocacy, reader’s advisory, and resources you provided during the current school year. Do not be afraid to share stories. Testimonials from students and faculty are powerful language to put in your annual report. Don’t wait to ask for testimonials until the end of the school year though. Gather stories and curate them over the course of the year. Did a student thank you for helping them with their assignment? Did the teacher come back to you and say that the students did well on their projects as a result of your instruction? Write these things down. Better yet, get them to write these things down.
You and your Advisory Committee will discuss what should go into the annual report starting in the fall. It is important to be proactive because it is impossible to gather all of your data at the last minute at the end of the school year. Start keeping notes and memorialize what you gather over the course of each month. This will make the report so much less daunting to complete by the end of the school year. Other things to include are snapshots of student work and quotes from the students’ exit tickets. The many voices of those who use the library will be your most powerful proof of your program’s impact and demonstrate the lengths and depths of your reach. Also, by doing an annual report, you are showing evidence of you being a reflective practitioner.
Libraries are very expensive. The VITAL Libraries grant is probably the most dearly-won and priciest grant awarded to a school library program in the United States, maybe the world. The VITAL Libraries program, as well as your administration, wants to see a return on their investment in your program from before and after winning the grant for your library.
Conclusion
Above are just some of the things an Advisory Committee can do for the school library program, the librarian, and the school community. Many librarians work alone in their buildings and are therefore the only ones in the building who know what they do and do what they do. And in some cases, what the librarian does is a mystery to their colleagues and their students. I have often been asked if I even need to go to school to become a librarian and my students and colleagues are both surprised to learn that acquiring a master’s degree in library science is a mandated requirement. I have been met with shock when I reveal this truth as sometimes all people see are me shelving books or checking them in and out. They have no idea that I have an entire invisible skill set that the rest of my colleagues do not have! With an Advisory Committee, the librarian is now on an equal footing with their colleagues. And if students are on the committee, this is even better as they can see the librarian in a new light and appreciate that the librarian is indeed a well-educated teacher, a dedicated school team member, a committed instructional partner, a knowledgeable leader, and a player on the road to student academic success.
Works Cited
Canadian School Libraries. “Foundations for School Library Learning Commons in Canada.” Canadian School Libraries, 14 November 2023, https://www.canadianschoollibraries.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/CSL_Foundations-Frameworks_FINAL_Nov2023.pdf. Accessed 8 February 2024.
Canadian School Libraries. “Moving Forward.” Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in Canada, https://llsop.canadianschoollibraries.ca/moving-forward/. Accessed 8 February 2024.
Cravey, N. (2013). Finding Inspiration in the Common Core. Knowledge Quest, 42(1), 18–22.
Dawkins, A. M. (2023). Community of Courage. Leveraging the Advisory Committee to Support Your Library. School Library Connection, 4, 37-38.
Harper, Meghan, and Jennifer Schwelik. “School Library Challenge.” Knowledge Quest, vol. 42, no. 1, Sept. 2013, pp. 24–28.
Kachel, Debra. “The principal and the librarian: Positioning the school library program.” Teacher Librarian 45.1 (2017): 50-52.
Keeling, Mary. “Mission Statements: Rhetoric, Reality, or Road Map to Success?” Knowledge Quest, vol. 42, no. 1, Sept. 2013, pp. 30–36.
Lance, Keith Curry, and Debra Kachel. “Achieving Academic Standards through the School Library Program.” Teacher Librarian, vol. 40, no. 5, June 2013, pp. 8–13.
Lance, Keith Curry, and Debra E. Kachel. “Why school librarians matter: What years of research tell us.” Phi Delta Kappan 99.7 (2018): 15-20.
Owen, Deborah, and Patricia Sarles. “Exit Tickets: The Reflective Ticket to Understanding.” Library Media Connection, vol. 31, no. 3, Nov. 2012, pp. 20–22.
Pickett, Janie. “First Steps with a Library Advisory Committee.” Knowledge Quest, vol. 42, no. 1, Sept. 2013, pp. 14–17.
Sannwald, Suzanne. “Reading the Room: Sustaining Our Libraries by Identifying and Responding to the Needs of Our Communities.” Knowledge Quest, vol. 49, no. 5, May 2021, pp. 26–31.
Sarles, Patricia and Geri Ellner Krim. “Library Advisory Committees are VITAL.” (In press).
Wong, Tracey. “Strategic Long-Range Planning.” Library Media Connection, vol. 31, no. 2, Oct. 2012, pp. 22–24.
Patricia Sarles is a Coordinator of Library Services with New York City Public Schools. She holds three master’s degrees in Anthropology, Library Science, and Educational Leadership. This article was born out of a need to educate, motivate, and demonstrate how our school librarians can conduct their Library Advisory Committees (aka LLC Leadership Teams) for our VITAL Libraries grant program, a singular grant available only to New York City Public School librarians. However, it is the author’s wish to inspire other school librarians to implement these leadership teams for their school libraries as librarians can have leadership teams without having won a grant.