WSWHE BOCES School Library System
September 27, 2021
We are Social Butterflies!
Meeting Preferences 2021 - 2022
Getting to Know You!
BEDS Day - October 6, 2021
Sora
Sora News--lots to share
NY Reads--Please take advantage of this NEW always-available collection of hundreds of titles! You and your students & teachers have to manually add it, but you only have to set it once. SLS can assign these titles to students for you as well. This can be a total game changer for teachers getting class sets of books into students' hands! Make sure you browse the collection and get a sense of what is in there.
Look for the "No Waiting" banners in Sora. OverDrive recently gave us access to more simultaneous access titles that you'll find in these banners, blended with some other always-available titles we already own. You will likely see overlap with the new NY Reads collection; the more ways to get to titles, the better! (And both collections can be searched at the same time.)
There will be a "no waiting" title available November 1-15 for high schoolers called Five Total Strangers as part of OverDrive's Big Library Read.
There is also an always-available SEL collection in Sora until June 2022, as well as a collection of titles in Spanish. (This collection will be changing in October, titles TBD, but we will still have a batch of Spanish-translated titles in Sora.) And for MultiMedia users, Alicia has been building Sora collections as well. Basically, there's a lot to unpack in Sora! Feel free to email us with any questions.
OPALS
OPALS can help your district set up a "set it and forget it" option for automatically updating your students on a regular basis.
We will be sending out a refresher on ILLs, since many of us are rusty, and we can do webinars on this as well. You can also find information on our LibGuides.
Professional Book Collection
Managing the Successful School Library
Your students, my students, our students: rethinking equitable and inclusive classrooms
Available through ILL
WSWHE Rockstar School Librarian - Mike Davies - South Glens Falls High School
I would bring my English class to the library for research and independent book selections multiple times per year and saw how much Barb Zuccaro enjoyed the position. She would do a great job selecting books and providing quick synopses of them, and she was expert at using the databases and citing. I am drawn to those aspects of the job, and she was a great model. I also attended the SUNY Adirondack “bridge” conference for several years and started to get the feel that high school libraries were about to undergo a significant change, and librarians seemed to have significant autonomy vis a vis those changes.
At the risk of overusing a brutal cliche--it’s the kids who make me happy to come into work each day. Our numbers are way down due to Covid, but the library is filling back up, and it’s the daily interactions with the students that means the most to me.
Barb started a good weeding process before she left in order not to leave it for whoever followed her, and I have picked it up and thrown myself into it last year and this year. When I started going through the shelves, it was clear that a great deal was duplicated in databases, so I had to really look at why I was keeping it. I have also been trying to develop a strong digital literacy plan with a focus on vetting sources/discerning real from fake news and have worked with pretty much all of our ninth graders and twelfth graders. I used Common Sense Media as a launching point but also created my own lesson, and have had good reactions to it from students and teachers.
Tied into the last answer, I am most excited about being a librarian during such a paradigm shift as to how information is sought out and consumed. Maybe our most daunting and exciting challenge is convincing students that vetting news and sources is worthwhile and that we each have a responsibility in the dissemination of information and news.
School Library System Staff
Karin Howansky, School Library Media Specialist
Amy Brennan-Strack, Databases, Budgets, General Information
Deb Massa, Information Processing Specialist
Email: libraryservices@wswheboces.org
Website: https://www.wswheboces.org/apps/pages/SchoolLibraryServices
Location: 267 Ballard Road, Gansevoort, NY, USA
Phone: 518-581-3700
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WSWHE-BOCES-School-Library-System-103830155380276
Twitter: @WSWHEBOCES_SLS