Last year's reflection...revisited

  "Frankly, it has been a year of necessary reinvention for our library as it has been for the institution of libraries everywhere.
   What does it mean to be a library at this instant? I think, as never before, it is for each school community to decide. Our idea of what constitutes a “resource” needs to expand. Our expectation of what a librarian might manage and administer needs to expand. Our preconceived notions of the library space as a citadel of quiet and catalogs needs to be shelved. I’m already on these pages.
   It is a hugely exciting opportunity for us that I hope the staff and administration grasp and invest in. Right now our impact is tactical. It would be awesome to see the results if it were strategic.
   My vision is that our library concern itself less with being a virtual library and more with being an actual library. Our students crave an opportunity to discover, create, and exhibit what they can do. They need a ready stage to perform on, an always museum that is zero miles away, an open audio/video lab to match their electronic imagination, a workbench to dismantle and build, a dais to debate and a podium to read poetry. In a word; a library of our own making.
   The notion of a librarian and a room that waits to interact with students until a teacher herds an entire class here to sit 4-to-a-table died about five years ago. This library is now functioning as an independent laboratory for learners with its own assignment/opportunities: chairs being painted by artists, poems being composed by armchair readers, video ads filmed and exported, murals planned and executed, student initiatives cultivated and facilitated (plus a foreign language tutor for two hours every other day: one on one learning!).
   I withdrew thirty shelves-worth of old books so that I could remove four floor fixtures so that I could enlarge our flexible space (We accommodated a six-foot high book arch project and a chair-painting demonstration while hosting an all-day superintendents’ conference.) In fact, our entire book collection would fit as stacks in the Library computer lab. Does the prospect of that large of a flexible room brim with possibilities for you as it does for me: Remediation center, breakfast-break station, writing lab, class meetings, tutoring stations, discovery center, reading buddy corner?
   I believe that the “library resource center” that we invent can address real needs at ACS. I believe also that the unique skills I possess as an individual will serve me in these capacities as much as the common skills I share with my fellow librarians; maybe even more so.
   I just know that our students have so many needs and that the former models of serving them through classrooms or through a website is no longer applicable. And so that one-minute long teachable moment that I used to use to explain our OPAC or how to use an index, I now use it to invite/challenge the student to explore, make, plan, build, something from that nub of interest. And it’s working, one student at a time, in the library."