The biggest point that I came away with from reading G. Edward Evan's Chapter 9 of The Portable MLIS is that communication skills are an absolute requirement of an outstanding librarian. Although Evan's lists seven key areas as stand alone points, I feel that five in particular are integral in the developing librarian's communication skills.
It all comes down, really, to Evan's first area of "know/learn your service communities needs and interests." (pg. 88-90.) This is a multi-faceted area in a school setting. You have many factions of the community: the students, teachers, parents, and even those making the budget decisions. Each one of these factions may have very different ideas of what is needed, acceptable or beneficial material. For example, some parents may not want controversial material allowed, while teachers may disagree about specific subject matter or sources for information. As the librarian, you must consider all of the represented cultures, reading levels, ages and interests of the students. And with the growing emphasis on standardized testing, comparative needs should be given detailed attention. Evans states that using benchmarking can help to increase budget support (pg. 89), and that is something to really take note of, with budget cuts seeming to be across the board these days. By being able to back up your requests with statistics from other schools, you may get that additional funding. With all of these factors to consider, I understand why Evans says that newcomers to collection development rely heavily on normative needs (pg. 88)- it is a basis to start with until you get to know all of your community needs more intimately. I think it is important to learn these needs, using such ideas as questionnaires to students, parents and teachers, as well as comparisons to other schools, to name only a few. The ability to communicate (and do it well) with all sorts of people in all sorts of positions in respect to the library collection choices is fundamental to developing a successful collection.
Knowing your community is really the foundation of some of the other areas that Evans discusses. Expecting change, being flexible, scanning the environment, building relationships, engaging in collaborative ideas, and accessing information are all based on knowing who your community envelops and exactly what their needs are. Expecting change in an ever-changing community and being flexible is an exciting prospect of becoming a librarian, and I look forward to developing both my own life- long learning skills, and also those of the students and my co-workers. The next, engage in scanning, is directly linked to expecting change. When you are continuously scanning the environment, you should certainly get the heads up that change is occurring. The trick will be learning to scan all the relevant areas in your community (such as ethnicity as Evans points out, but also changing interests of children, new educational material, different teaching techniques in new staff members, and new technology), and knowing how to accommodate these changes in the best way on a limited budget!
Scanning and expecting change are two ways in which to get to know your community. Building relationships and engaging in collaborative activities are also facets of knowing your community. A tremendous part of building relationships professionally is to work collaboratively on programs. Again, there are so many different groups to build relations with: parents, teachers, vendors, and of course, the students themselves, that it is vitally important to be “scanning” these relationships, too, ensuring that the wants and needs of all the groups are not going to go unnoticed. Collaborative projects that incorporate two or more of these groups will help unify all of the benefits of a library within a school. When I went to my son’s open house at school, we visited the library as a family, and we were the only ones there! I think open house can be time to bring students, parents, and teachers together to start the dialogue, the importance of which can not be overstated. When else can you have everyone in the same building?!? Using posters, games, contests, free coffee- anything to get the families in there! This dovetails nicely with Evan’s last point of accessing the information. You may have the best collection out there, but if the community is not accessing it, the information is useless.
I hope that forging close relations with all aspects of my school community, listening to everyone’s needs, working together on projects and being flexible and open to change will help open the lines of communication. I will strive to have a close knit library community of the children, their parents and my coworkers, and to utilize all of our resources to the fullest. It is very important to me to not be a “status- quo” librarian, but to be an innovative, pro- active leader in my school community. I believe that really great communication skills using these areas of collection development are an integral part of these goals.
Evans, G. E., (2008). Reflections on Creating Information Service Collections. In K. Haycock, & B. E. Sheldon (Eds.), The Portable MLIS: Insights from the Experts (pp. 87-97), Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited
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