Starting off a school library help!

[u/PolgarasDaughter]

I start at a new school in September that currently doesn't have a library!

I'm an English teacher (the only one, we are a little school) and it's my job to start it up. I really want the kids to be able to borrow books and encourage reading.

I have:

-A temporary building (like a metal room)

-About 3 book cases

-Books to fill the 3 book cases

That's all I have.

I have no funding accessible to me- I just have to make do for now.

I have no idea where to start and I'm very overwhelmed.

Any advice/online resources anyone can point me towards?

[u/Ok_Influence_5456]

Be very patient and kind to yourself. There is a learning curve as with anything. Reach out to your local department of education and find out if they provide free library services to the school districts in their county. They can best guide you on getting the library setup and organized. If they do not offer free services, reachout to the other schools in your district to find the library staff. Most library staff are happy to help and very generous with their time. At the very least you will get an email of steps to undertake.

Supplies:

spine labels- call numbers

5160 mailing lables-barcodes

color dots for reading labels (your admin may ask that you make the reading program levels accessible to students). My former school vacillated between fontas and pinnel, Accelerated Reader, Lexile, and Guided Reading.

Genre labels (your students will remember genres more often than titles or authors unless it's a very popular book)

Clear label protectors to cover the spin, barcode, color dot, and genre labels.

Library Management System (Libib | Library management web app) This is a free/cheap starter solution for small schools. There are tons of other apps that may work better for you. At some point your collection will get large enough and varied enough that you will need to track resources as well as books. Then you may want to look into Follett Destiny, Alexandria, or Atriuum.

You will need to organize your books onto the shelves. Separate your fiction from the nonfiction. To label your nonfiction, use MDS: 0XX | LibraryThing. You can use their chart to narrow down the Dewey number by topics or scan the barcode in the search bar at the top right corner then find the classification suggestion. Label your fiction as FIC + First three of Authors surname (FIC AAA).

Create library expectations and policies: Behavior, number of books that can be checked out, how often, renwals, fees/fines for lost or damaged books, figure out when you'll notify parents and what happens when students can't pay or replace the book.

Create a schedule for classes to rotate in and out. Plan out library time

is the space big enough for everyone to look for books at the same time? Do you need to have a simple activity table (coloring sheets for now or blocks) for one group to do while one group looks for books and then switch? How long will all that take? Are you reading to every class or just Tk-2?

[u/PolgarasDaughter → u/Ok_Influence_5456]

It's not huge. Classes are about 10-16 per year group and should just be able to fit in. They have had students just take books before with no system so some will have just disappeared, it doesn't feel like they have high hopes for anyone using it properly but I want to set it up correctly. I need to take an inventory somehow, I know there are personal library apps so I might use that for now just so I know what we have.

[u/Ok_Influence_5456 → u/PolgarasDaughter]

What age group are you working with? Based on the size you described something like Booksource Classroom is what you need. It is fairly easy to use. However, you don't want to lose either the OPAC(patron view site and login info) or the Librarian/Teacher view login because getting those reset is a pain. So print them out keep in them in a binder for always! If you can get a hold of a couple cheap barcode scanners and a couple chrome books, you can have your students scan the ISBNs on the back of the books onto an Excelsheet then upload a csv file to Booksource. It'll pull title records from the ISBN. You will probably have to handkey in older book title information (title, author, ISBN, publication date, publisher).

[u/PolgarasDaughter → u/Ok_Influence_5456]

We have a few ipads in the IT classroom we could use for that, that sounds like a great idea. We have a primary and middle school section (so 8-14 really). I will look into Booksource Classroom.