A Living Library: with Brooke Corso
The Librarian Influencer of the Week is Brooke Corso who works at a middle school in Houston, Texas.
In this podcast, Brooke recalls some interesting facts about her two “first-years” in the library. http://laurasheneman.libsyn.com/a-living-library-with-brooke-corso
She compared moving into a library like moving into someone else’s house. You need to do some things to make it your own and feel settled.
In her first library, she genrified her library in hopes of supporting all levels of readers. It took about 3 months to finish this task.
She believes genrefying the library made her students more independent.
In her second library, it took about 11 months to fully weed her library.
Your library should be a Living Library where the librarian creates a hub for reducing the achievement gap and access gap for our students. Here are a couple of Librarian Influencer strategies Brooke shared:
She reaches out to department heads at the beginning of each year to ask about meeting with the teams during their meetings or to offer a tour of the resources related to their content area.
She makes library displays tied to the content that teachers are currently teaching.
Brooke identifies how she addresses each of the 4 kinds of readers.
She moved the scary books, funny books, graphic novels, and manga to the front of the library to make it easy for her struggling readers to access.
She strategically arranged her genres to try to influence students to see sections they might normally not be drawn to, like supernatural across from romance. She has seen a boost in circulation. From August 26-December 19, 2019, students read more books than the entire 2018-201 school year. From Follett Destiny: - 8,599 circulations from 8/26/18 - 6/1/19 (a full year before genrefying) - 8,627 circulations from 8/26/19 - 12/19/19 (1/2 year with Genrefied library)
Take advantage of any opportunities your superiors offer to you.
You can follow Librarian Influencer Brooke Corso at:
Twitter: @pomslibrary
Library Website: www.bit.ly/pomslibrary https://www.houstonisd.org/Page/123286