I want to be more reflective, share more about the daily happenings in my school library and the challenges I face, so here’s the first of my Life in the Library posts.

It’s been a busy two weeks of the fourth school term here in Queensland. I started the term by attending the IFLA and ALIA Research and Effective Practices Seminar, Sustainable Reading at Every Age and Stage. It was great to connect with school and public library staff from around Australia for some incredible discussions and presentations on supporting reading.

The term officially kicked   off with a number of events hosted in our library and Innovation Precinct. At my heart, I’m an event girl – not an attendee and certainly not the centre of attention – but I do love organising and being in the background of a good event. There’s just something about the atmosphere, so it’s kind of lucky that the Innovation Precinct where our library is housed happens to be the event hub of the school now. It means we always have to be ready to completely flip areas and showcase what our space does and I love inviting these groups into our space and showing them that the library is the hub of the school.

I’ve also been focusing on getting our junior library ready to move back in and opened at the start of next year. That journey began in February this year when we had water inundation and had to remove the entire collection in under two hours. Since then, the junior library team and collection have been housed up in the Innovation Precinct with the secondary library and it really has been wonderful having the whole team together. I’m a whole library team girl at heart and it has offered amazing opportunities but also lots of challenges that the team have had to work around and I’m so impressed with how they have faced absolutely every one of them. Now comes the fun part. We’ve been working to design the space and select new shelving and furniture to meet the needs of our students and what we want the space to achieve. It’s really shown me the love I have for this sort of library design work.

I’ve also been working on how I can collaborate with teachers more. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had to reduce the number of lessons I take and the collaboration with teachers to the focus on multiple library moves and the demands of our new building and spaces and what additional jobs this places upon my role. This term I wanted to focus on the core business of library, teaching library lessons, information literacy and digital literacy, and reach out to teachers encouraging them to use our space and resources more. It’s a slow rebuild but it’s important work and I can see progress already, which I’m pleased about.

What has life in your library been like recently?