The bad news is of course all the cutbacks. But it's more of a freezing than a cutting at this point. There was only one retirement, but that position had been filled already. I just got word that a middle school position is opening up, but there are a few "displaced" people floating around that will surely snap that up quickly.
We were asked to look carefully at the lists of things the county provides and rank them. Right now they provide us all with subscriptions to Booklist, Library Media Connection, and School Library Journal. It seemed from my informal polling that School Library Journal remains at the top of the list, even though I talked up LMC. We can read SLJ online but some people prefer an actual magazine when their on their workout machines.
Our state is debating funding for Galileo (which includes favorites Britannica and NoveList). We can't control that, but we were asked to rank the other online resources provided by the district. Of course the World Book offerings were at the top of the list.
An interesting discussion we got into in one of the breakout sessions I attended was all those book study professional books administrator's always seem to find the money for. You know what I mean. A copy of something like one of those How Full Is Your Bucket? books for every staff member that was passed out with great enthusiasm in 2005 and is now collecting dust in a storage closet somewhere. Stuff like that.
We were trying to figure out if they should all at least be barcoded so we could see what we have and other schools could look them up for ILL sharing. There was talk of sending them all to our central Professional Library, but since some of these book studies are spread out over a full year, that doesn't seem feasible.
I was actually in the Professional Library for this discussion. A couple of my friends and I stuck around after and pulled out the oldest crate of School Library Journals they had in stock. 1972! I loved the ads for the new card catalog furniture the best. Nice stuff.
