According to the American Library Association (2018), collection maintenance and weeding are two pillars of collection management, with the former including a regular review of the collection for "accuracy, currency, usage, diversity, and subject area gaps" and the latter including the removal of resources on the basis of "accuracy, currency, and relevancy."

In order to uphold the standards of the ALA, begin the work of aligning the collection with the district's DEI goals, and offer students a variety of books that provide both the "windows and doors" urged by Rudine Sims Bishop, I have spent a considerable amount of time evaluating the Fox Meadow library collection.  

The artifacts below reflect this evaluation; the TitleWise analyses from August 2022 and June 2023 show the modest changes I have made over the course of the year to make the collection more accurate, current, and relevant through both purchases and weeding.  The weeded books show examples of books in the collection that were not only out of date, but were also not aligned with the district's DEI goals.

Supporting the overall school program means being responsive to faculty and administration requests, planning for how the organization of the library collection can best support the school curricula, and implementing activities that build on and extend the values of the school.

The artifacts below illustrate both how I have responded to and fulfilled requests from administration and faculty and implemented a community-building kindness activity. Additionally, another way in which I am working towards ensuring the library bests supports the school program is through exploring the possibility of genrefying the fiction section of the library, as classes conduct genre studies of literature, and students frequently ask for books by genre, rather than by author. In order to gather more data about genrefying, I visited Kate Byrnes, the librarian at Quaker Ridge, in order to discuss her process for genrefying and observe a genrefied library space. Although I do not have photographic evidence to include in this portfolio yet, I hope to have concrete evidence of genrefication in the future.

Being knowledgable about both literature and the school program means responding to requests from the faculty and administration for books that meet certain requirements and/or fulfill certain needs. Often these requests occur casually, as faculty drop into the library and ask for help curating books for a specific purpose; recent examples include a request from the school psychologist for books about friendship and inclusiveness, a request from several first grade teachers for books that inspire feelings of peacefulness, and a request from a kindergarten teacher for books that portray holiday celebrations around the world.  While these drop-in requests mean that I am able to respond to faculty book requests in the moment, they also mean that there is not always a record of these requests that can serve as an artifact. The few artifacts below represent a small portion of the often-casual requests I receive from faculty for resources to support their curricula; the first is a list of wellness book suggestions for classroom libraries requested by Ms. Feinberg to present to the Compact Team, and the second is a selection of nonfiction books on specific topics requested by Ms. Peragallo in support of the new TC nonfiction unit. 

Since kindness is a quality we strive to cultivate in our students and value we strive to promote at Fox Meadow, for Kindness Day in November I created an activity in which 4th and 5th grade students created bookmarks with encouraging and kind sayings and tuck them in books throughout the library, so that students who took out those books would encounter an unexpected bit of kindness and encouragement in their day; the bookmarks below represent a small sampling of the nearly 150 bookmarks that were tucked into books throughout the library.

Not only does planning an author visit require knowledge of both the school's program and resources beyond the school and district, but it also provides a wonderful opportunity to engage students in an in-depth author study in anticipation of an author visit and get students excited about reading!  

There are multiple layers to planning an author visit: determining the needs of the school program and aligning author visits to meet those needs; researching potential authors and contacting them to determine the feasibility of arranging a visit; balancing the goal of providing engaging author visits for all grades with the realities of the budget allocated for visits, facilitating book sales, coordinating with the PTA, arranging for the requirements (technological and otherwise) authors have for a successful visit, preparing students for an author visit, and hosting the author on the day of their visit.

The images here highlight Laurie Keller's author visit on March 17, 2023; Ms. Keller is an award-winning author and illustrator, and her visit for grades K-2 provided students with insight into how she became a writer and illustrator, how her writing process works, and how to draw some of her iconic characters, such as Arnie the Doughnut and Potato Pants.  The 3rd and 4th graders will have an author visit from Courtney Sheinmel, author of books such as the Stella Batts series and the Kindness Club series, at the end of April, and students in 2nd and 5th grades will have visits from Laura Marsh, award-winning author of over 30 non-fiction National Geographic Readers, in mid-April, in order to prepare them for their upcoming research projects (Passion Projects for 2nd grade and Capstone for 5th grade).