Amy Townsley's Bookish Corner

  I enjoyed comparing different online public access catalogs through Capterra  with my partner this week. This is an incredibly helpful website for librarians to make informed decisions about what library management system fits best their needs.  I am currently using Follett Destiny and always thinking about areas of improvement and costs, so I found this week's module very practical and helpful. I am posting our comparison to reference later on and am looking forward to reading through other team presentations. The analysis includes our interview notes as well. I have found Follett, although widely used, to be somewhat clunky but am thrilled to have discovered as a result of the class discussion that I do have access to Titlewave for in-depth analysis and genre tags. This is an incredibly useful tool. I am currently working with our school's IT Department to help give access to students so they can log into their accounts (as well as working with the Administration to ...

 I know-- most people still think of librarians and Library Science as rigid but I actually think there is a lot of creativity necessary to be able to successfully push forward as substantial changes are being made within the school libraries. I think the biggest takeaway from Kaplan's book was that there is room for decision-making based on the library situation. I found Kaplan's first chapter in Catalog It!  to be the most helpful for me in terms of finally learning about how we can best, "...move information from the source to the user" which is contingent upon how information is organized. A big takeaway too from this chapter was that "smaller libraries have muddled through by adapting rules when possible or simply creating their own" but that "in today's world of online catalogs and Web access to catalogs, it is not only impossible but also unwise to ignore cataloging standards." Chapter 4 was also helpful in articulating the "why...

 Topic: selection of Professional Development article- [1] why you chose this one, [2] what the main thrust of the article is, [3] what did you take away from it.   As mentioned in my discussion post this week, I picked Keeling's article, "The AASL Planning Guide: A District Guide to Powerful Professional Development" because there is currently no centralized district librarian/supervisor in the school district I started working in recently and my many questions about what/how to best implement research lessons with departments has led me to so many questions about what incoming freshman do and don't know about how to research for papers and projects. Although I have worked hard to meet with the other librarians in the elementary schools (there is no librarian in the middles school), I feel like at minimum, centralized best practices and check-in must exist for students to have a consistent experience.   As also mentioned in my discussion post, I wrote that "...I...