Notes and quotes from readings

Some where back in week 4 when we were studying the subject of acquisition, someone on the forum mentioned the idea that this was not brain science. Much of what I am finding with this course (ETL503) is that I have been doing all these library jobs but somehow they come naturally. Now that being said, I have found the readings are always interesting and I am learning new and better ways. 
Right now we are studying budget. This has to be one of my least favorite topics and is an area that I can improve on. In Jakarta, I had Irin (a dear, great secretary) who managed all the budget items. She was meticulous with every penny and rupiah, plus I received monthly updates from the business office and we could check our accounting against theirs. In Jakarta, I worked to spend every penny of our budget because in June when the books closed, any money left was unavailable for the following year. 
I assumed that I would also be getting information from the business office in my new job and as a result have done no record keeping of my budget this year in Ghana. Being new and secretaries being history, budgeting was left as a task to be done sometime. In the last few weeks as the end of the year approaches, I was requesting  an update on our budget from the business office. I have come to find out that this can not be done and the BO has no idea how much money the library has spent this year. OOPS! How can this be? It is time for me to sit down with our business manager and ask questions. So...I have made it a goal to be very meticulous next year with book keeping and my reading that I am doing now will be my guide. Here are some of the highlights of budgeting...

A formula for calculating a budget is- the number of items form that collection size x the average cost of items)/10. 
We have 24,073 items and I would say our average item cost for just books is about 18USD. Using this formula our budget if all the assumptions are true should be about 26,051USD. In my budget this is almost right on the nose for purchasing books only. I still have a budget for licenses, periodicals, technology consumables, supplies, furniture & fittings. I think that at this point Lincoln Community School has a healthy library budget. I am not sure many state-wide school or Australian schools can make that statement at this point in time. International schools still value libraries and give money for budgets that reflect a belief that students and the community gain from this investment. It is important the the teacher librarian 

I had an idea to take my budget for next year and infiltrate the library with kindles and ipads. At this point we have had 4 kindles since December and they have been in great demand. Due to living in Africa, we are only able to receive a shipment of books every August. This means that right what I am ordering is due in August 2012. This seem CRAZY. With the kindles, if a student/parent or teacher wants a book that we do not have and it is kindle available, I can download it in 5 minutes. They can be reading the book by the end of the day. At this point, I am only buying ebooks that we do not have available in the library. 

Take Risks and update your electronic collection
Our library collection is in good shape, well weeded, shelves are full, and the needs of teachers and students are being met to the best of our ability. Therefore, I am inclined to cut my book buying in half next year and supply the library with 20 more kindles (at a cost of 2,800USD) and 12 ipads (at a cost of 7,200USD). Plus money for buying apps and ebooks. The 12 ipads would be a pilot program to see how teachers can integrate and use them in classrooms. The kindles would be divided in to groups of 6 each. The reason for this is that if you buy one book from amazon you can place it on 6 different kindles. 24 kindles would create 4 groups and they could have one group as fiction pleasure reading, another group teacher requests for literature circles, a third group of non-fiction and the last group could be professional development books for teacher book groups. I have no idea how other schools are managing kindles in their libraries and this is something that needs some research. I have been on a PLN ning that has a active group of teacher sharing how ipads are being used in schools. What do you think?

Don’t be passive:
The second idea I would like to share is how advocating for your library can work. In Jakarta all 4 librarians felt that we could do better and our collections needed updating. We created a presentation from our individual Follett Analysis to present an argument that the libraries needed a infusion. We presented this argument to the administrators, who love data. We were given 300,000USD over three year to share and update our collection. We called this our extra-ordinary budget and we divided the money equally per student in each school. At the same time all our yearly budgets were increased as a result of showing data of other Asian International School library budgets, which all were substantially higher than ours. 

Debowski states that accountability incorporates three key principles: 

1. forward planning: collaborate with teachers and students, know units of study. 
2. rational application: all about selection
3. publicizing of outcomes: Celebrate what new!

Follett and other software make these principles much easy. An analysis can be done in than hour. How could it be that 7 years ago when I first worked as a teacher librarian, we were talking about the incredible time consuming process of creating an collection analysis/collection mapping. With this information at our fingertips it is much easier to manage and budget properly. Collection Mapping is HISTORY! Just think how many more hours I have available to actually teach!