Today's librarians more than keepers of books

Michele Lind doesn’t fit the image of the librarian sitting behind her circulation desk muttering “Shhhh!” every few minutes.

In fact, she says she would be thrilled — not embarrassed — if her principal walked in while kids’ chatter filled the library.

“My philosophy on quiet has changed,” said the library media specialist, who works at Roosevelt and Lewis and Clark elementary schools in Mandan. “I don’t want it to be wild and crazy and out of control, but I want it to be a little noisy.”

So do a growing number of school library heads who no longer see their sole purpose as keepers of books. They increasingly provide activities to prompt kids' imaginations and collaborate with teachers to integrate technology into the classroom.

The shift from old-school librarian to present-day library media specialist has occurred gradually over the past two decades. Still, local library media specialists find themselves debunking myths about their jobs.

Lind, for one, can see why people might question sending her students on a geocaching expedition. With GPS devices in hand, they searched their schools last year for hidden treasure.

“We are teaching them how to use technology,” she said. “We are teaching them how to apply latitude and longitude. They learn those concepts, but they are so foreign to them.”

Makerspaces

In some ways, children’s weekly visits to the library mimic those of their parents and grandparents. In Mandan and Bismarck public schools, they still check out books and listen to a library media specialist or an assistant read aloud.

“When I started, we were the study hall,” said State Librarian Mary Soucie, who worked in school libraries in the 1990s. “That’s where kids went when they were being disciplined.”

Some students today also spend their recess in the library, Lind said.

The difference? They come because they love “makerspaces,” which are designated areas within a library for kids to create anything from robotics to bookmarks.

The spaces popped up in school libraries throughout the country over the past several years, including in Bismarck and Mandan.

Library media specialists provide the supplies, then let the kids do the rest. Lind split classes into teams last year and gave each 100 red Solo cups. Each group had to come up with a way to stack the cups to ensure the structure would stand.

“I don’t think kids have time to play anymore,” Lind said. “A lot of them are on devices and computers. They forget about playing and creating.”

Misti Werle started a popular makerspaces club last year at Solheim Elementary School in Bismarck. The library media specialist, who earlier this month became the districtwide library media systems innovator for Bismarck Public Schools, regularly oversaw 25 kids who packed her library for weekly meetings after school.

“I had to turn kids away,” she said.

Collaborating with teachers

Blogs, Twitter chats, conferences and school library journals keep library media specialists up to speed on the newest tools available to enhance teaching.

The challenge is finding teachers who want to collaborate, Werle said.

“Often times, they don’t know what you can do for them,” she said.

The way she describes it, library media specialists have to advertise.

Lind knows what that's like. She researches what teachers at her schools are doing so she can devise ways to support them.

One tool she wants to try is Glogster, which she describes as a computer posterboard that can embed pictures, video and text.

“We are still trying to get that up and going,” Lind said. “It takes persistence and one teacher to set the example.”

She found some success last year teaching students email. She showed all her schools' third-, fourth- and fifth-graders how to compose and send an email, requiring them to use proper capitalization and punctuation. Every student messaged her, and she responded to each one.

One of the Lewis and Clark teachers then integrated that lesson into her class. Instead of turning in a sheet of paper with answers to questions, that teacher asked her students to email their responses to the assignment.

Split time

Lind sees the email lesson as a start to more collaboration. Part of the problem, she said, is that she’s split between two schools. She’s not always present when it’s convenient for a teacher to work with her.

That’s the case for library media specialists in Bismarck, too, which has 19 specialists split between 24 schools. Many work at two Bismarck schools, though there are several assigned to three, Werle said.

Kirsten Baesler was the librarian at five elementary schools when she started working for Bismarck Public Schools in 1989. Before she was elected state superintendent in 2012, she served dual roles at Saxvik Elementary School: assistant principal and library media specialist.

“My time as a library media specialist was the best training ground to know my responsibilities as a state superintendent,” she said. “It was absolutely essential for one to know all the standards on all the subjects for all the grade levels.”

Navigating resources

In doing so, Baesler could work better to assist teachers with classroom projects. As a young librarian, she frequently scoured the shelves and borrowed books from neighboring libraries to supply kids with an adequate amount of research materials.

“My big challenge was to make sure there were enough resources available to our students,” she said.

That changed by the time she was elected state superintendent. She taught kids to sort through the plethora of information available online, discerning reliable sources such as .gov sites from Wikipedia articles.

“There are people who say libraries aren’t relevant anymore,” said Werle, explaining that kids’ first instinct is often to turn to Google.

Students will probably find higher-quality sources in databases, which can quickly sort through articles with the search of a keyword, she said.

The State Library at the Capitol grounds in Bismarck pays more than $270,000 each year for databases, including Encyclopedia Britannica, and makes them available to school districts, Soucie said.

Werle said Bismarck Public Schools alone could not afford all those subscriptions.

“Libraries have and always will be about making connections,” Soucie said. “We’re just using different tools to do that now.”