Study Visit 1 - International School of Kuala Lumpur

My first study visit took place on 18th April at ISKL's Elementary School (http://www.iskl.edu.my/library/library.php) with teacher librarian, JE. I know J through the KL librarians' network we both belong to and admire the wealth of knowledge and experience she has in the field of teacher librarianship. J is passionate about reading and children's literature, and has worked for New Zealand's National Library.
J has been working at ISKL for eight months and explained that she has spent a large portion of her budget transforming the collection from a dated US-centric one to one with more of a modern international focus. She hopes the revamped collection will better suit the needs of the school community. J has also concentrated on updating the genre section, series and easy reading/chapter books. The collection is predominantly print, but they do have subscriptions to a few online resources. A cybrarian has been appointed to begin work in August and her role will be to push digital learning throughout the school. What an exciting appointment to the school!

The photo below shows the inviting area J has created for parents. She believes it's important for the community to feel welcome in the library.

The library has links on the school website, but as yet there is no reaching out to the school community through social networking as in a blog, Facebook page or Twitter. J sees the merits in using these technologies, but just hasn't had the time to set them up. It was good to hear about some of the initiatives taking place in the library:

• Creating different spaces for different purposes e.g. parents' section
• Bringing everything down to eye level
• Improving displays & signage
• Creating new collections e.g. chapter books, sophisticated picture books for older readers
• Including children in designing the Manga comic area “Heaven Sent” on iPads

I appreciate J's creative (and free) ways of providing on-site professional development for her staff. They role play interactions with staff and parents, spend 30 minutes a week in the “help” section of their library management system (Destiny) and she also encourages them to read a book a week of their choice.

This study visit helped me to see the similarities and differences between our two international school libraries. We are alike in that we have school management that support our programs, healthy budgets for materials and visiting authors, vision for how we want our libraries to improve and that we both spend the majority of our working days doing admin work. Major differences include number of qualified staff and size of budgets.

I found that there are more similarities than differences in our libraries, so I hope this means that we are both on the right track for providing first class services to our patrons.