LIBE+463+Assignment+3

=**Collection Evaluation and Report**=

The ECHE library is a dual-track English-French Immersion library housing approximately 13,000 books for some 415 students. The library is divided into separate sections for English Fiction and French Fiction; English Easy and French Easy; English Graphic Novels; English Gr 7 Only and French Gr 7 Only sections. The Reference and Non-fiction have both French and English shelved together. All French books are marked with a small yellow dot on the spine label to help students and staff identify them.

The area of the BC curriculum I am focusing on for this class is Science 5 and the strands are Simple Machines, Human Body and Renewable and Non-Renewable Resources (Forestry, Mining and Fishing).

__**Quantitative Data**__
Our school district is one of the few left in the province that has a central District Resource Centre (DRC) for its library services. The DRC provides the District libraries with many valuable and essential services from MARC records to centralizing our library Sirsi-Dynix database. Sirsi-Dynix allows our DRC Administrator to open particular features to the individual schools and keep other features restricted to the DRC only. The quantitative data required for this assignment happens to be one of the restricted features and due to unforeseen circumstances the Sirsi information was unavailable. Instead I have collected what quantitative data I could from our Enterprise OPAC system.

The first problem that I encountered with this data collection was that the DRC put in Enterprise during the previous summer and launched it in November 2011. Due to the labour dispute between teachers and their employer, the Union would not allow the DRC Administrator to come to our Local Specialist Association (LSA) meetings to provide training for this system. We had to play around in it and figure it out ourselves. Thus, some of the problems I encountered are from having no training for Enterprise.
 * **Section** || **Subject** || *** of items English** || *** of items French || Average Age of Item ||
 * 621.8 - 621.811 || Simple Machines || 22 || n/a || ** 1997/2012 ||
 * 612-612.8 || Human Body || 36 || n/a || 1997/2000 ||
 * 333/634/639 || Renewable/Nonrenewable Resources || 29 || n/a || 1997/2007 ||

One problem encountered with this data collection was that I was unable to discover how many books were in French as the only language option was English for this particular type of search. I do not know why as I can locate French titles when I do fiction searches. I also had to limit the subjects and remove all non-related subjects from the search. I was able to include/exclude publication dates but I only did this for Simple Machines and I discovered that I had 6 books published in 1997 and 6 books in 2007. I stopped looking for publication dates after Simple Machines because of the number of screenshots I had to take to record this information as raw data. It became cumbersome. Also, including/excluding material type confused the search results for me so I tried separating books, audio-visual and kits for the Human Body section, but again, the number of screen shots become cumbersome and I still did not know what I had in French.

In order to create a document containing the raw data from the Enterprise searches I had to take individual screenshots, paste them into Paint, crop them then re-paste the cropped shot into a Word document. This became overly time consuming and tedious very quickly. So I changed methods of data collection.

__**Qualitative Data**__
Due to the difficulties encountered in attempting to collect quantitative data I switched to qualitative data. First I sent out a memo to the staff to quickly survey which curriculum strands they were planning on teaching next year. (See Assignment 3 - Raw Data for the survey questions). Many of our staff have had to change grade levels next year and the timing of this assignment has coincided with report card writing so I received only 4 replies back out of 20 and only 1 of the 4 is from someone teaching grade 5 next year. That teacher will be teaching Simple Machines and the other two Science strands will be from grade 4.

Next I shelf read for the three strand areas. Below is the actual raw data. I included it here rather than on the Raw Data page as the original data is scribbled over four pieces of lined paper! Note: All Reference material in print is in English we have not found material in French for our curriculum at a French language level that our students would be able to read as FSL learners. Simple Machines || Eng 3 Fr 0 || 3 || 37 || 2 || 1 || 2 || 3 || Human Body || Eng 10 Fr 0 || 21 || 55 || 1 2 models || 1 || 3 || 7 Eng 4 Fr 3 || Forestry/Mining/ Fishing || All Eng Forestry 5, 1 CD Rom 1 Chart Mining 2 Fishing 2 || ? || Forestry 13 Mining 9 Fishing 7 || Forestry 1 Mining 1 || 1 || 1 || 0 ||
 * **Section** || **Videos** || **French Books** || **English Books** || **English Kits** || **French Kits** || **Reference** || **Series** ||
 * 621.8 - 621.973
 * 612-612.4
 * 333/634.9/639.2

__**Summary of Findings**__
The books in all three subject areas are in very good condition. There are no duplicates or worn books as we weeded in March 2012.

The kits are the more important part of this analysis as the teachers use the kits to drive their units. For Simple Machines, Human Body and Natural Resources we have Scholastic Pan Canadian Science programs in both English and French. We also have a playground kit that I believe was for a primary grade when simple machines was a unit there. For grade 5 we also have the Probe 5 program that contains all three science units in it. The English teachers preferred using the forestry and mining kits to teach those units with. The forestry kit is produced by the National Forest Product Association and they were giving them to teachers who attended their workshops. The mining kit is produced by the Mining Association of BC and is also given to teachers who attend their workshops. All the teachers who attended these workshops felt they were stellar and the kits were to be treasured.

The books from the library that both French and English teachers wanted to enhance their units were on Simple Machines and Human Body. This data confirms what I suspected earlier in the year and that was that we are in dire need of French resources for Simple Machines and we could boost our French books for the human body as well. We also show a significant lack of audio-visual material for all three science units. This is a difficulty because of performance rights - the District has to have to correct performance rights for the French videos as Quebec laws are different as well as the level of French language spoken. Our students are FSL - French Second Language - who come from Anglophone families. When purchasing books or audio-visual material I have to ensure that the level of written and spoke language will be appropriate for the FSL students. Because the students come from English speaking families, their level of French is lower than their counter-parts from Francophone families.

In response to the lack of French material and the difficulty in purchasing said material at the appropriate reading levels I have decided to attempt to send emails to the three French book companies that our District has special purchasing arrangement with. I will try sending them links to English material (available through Amazon.ca) and see if they can recommend a similar book in French. DVD's will require consultation with the DRC Administrator due to performance rights issues.

I pulled one English book each from three series for simple machines and the human body. The books cover a range of reading levels, contain bright, bold pictures, brightly coloured and labelled diagrams and all having glossaries and the newest publications listing web sites for students to visit. All had bold chapter headings. None had sidebars, graphs or charts. I am satisfied that these books will meet the needs of our students.

I did not worry about the books we had for the resource unit as the kits have what are needed and the Pan Canadian Science program has student textbooks as does Probe 5 and the teachers were not as interested in having books for this unit.

Reference material for Science 5 is available to students in both digitally and in print. The District has World Book Online, Searchasaurus, Kids Search and National Film Board (NFB) videos available to students and staff both on site and by remote access. The library has bookmarks for anyone wishing remote access login information. These four reference resources are among a bundle the District has available through ERAC. The library also has the World Book (2007) in print as well as Marshall Cavendish Encyclopedia of Health (2005).

I found, yet again, that Searchasaurus, which is listed as a K-5 database has its lexical reading levels set much too high for a K-5 audience. I entered a search for forestry and the reading levels came up for grades 9-12 for ALL of the search results. I have brought that to the attention of the DRC Administrator and will do so again. She was attempting to get that fixed. As the new LRB ruling came in I think we can now have the Administrator provide the training for Enterprise so that can be set for September.

__**Reflection**__
I found this assignment to be very, very eye-opening and useful. The disparity between 'theory' and 'practice' was really brought to light. Bishop states, "In your policy and procedures manual, you should include who evaluates the collection, what types of evaluation measures are used, and when evaluation of the collection takes place" (143). I do not have a 'school' policy and procedures manual although I do have a 'draft' version that I put together. This draft needs to be approved, but before that happens it also needs to be up-dated. This is also the first time I have evaluated a part of the collection outside of the fiction section. When I did do the evaluation of the fiction section I did not use any evaluation measures other than my own knowledge of my users and my instincts. I did purchase some books based on journal reviews as well.

I found that even though I had unexpected difficulties with gathering quantitative data, I discovered I did not really need it as much as I thought I would. I had a list combining materials under a wide range of subjects where I was not able to determine how many of these items were actually useful to my Science 5 curriculum. I had to narrow the search parameters and then the number of items was far less than the number of items actually on the shelf. I found that I had a chart of numbers that allowed me to see gaps, but did not allow for an "element of judgement found in qualitative data...(Bishop, 2007,143). I found the qualitative data much more valuable and informative.

The qualitative data that I collected via a staff survey and shelf reading gave me a much more in-depth picture of how the library's collection supported the Science 5 curriculum. It was very obvious that more French materials would be needed. The survey information regarding the Resource unit was incredibly valuable for discovering the value of the two large kits, one for forestry and one for mining. As Bishop states, "For subjects that have a low priority in ta collection, infrequently used material are probably unnecessary" (146). This relates directly to the Resource unit.

I found that Chapter 12 in Bishop's text to be the most helpful and it would be what I will base the revisions to my draft policy manual on. I will also attempt to conduct a collection analysis/mapping once per year for a particular subject area. We just completed a 'by-the-seat-of-your-pants' one for ancient civilizations as we had weeded heavily and the two new grade 6/7 teachers were using that Social Studies unit for a project. I had replaced a number of items as these two teachers were teaching ancient China as well as Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome and Greece. Prior to this year, and for the four years I have been the Teacher-Librarian at this school, no projects had been done for this curriculum area and it had not been taught, Gr 6 Japan had been. This assignment has been immensely beneficial in that I now know how to do the analysis correctly and when to do it. Up until this assignment my 'practice' certainly did not match the 'theory' behind it.

Bibliography Bishop, K. (2007). __The collection program in schools:Concepts, practices, and information sources__. 4th ed. Libraries Unlimited: Westport.