AASL Standards in Practice: Curation

I’m back to talk more about the AASL National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries and how librarians in the field are putting the standards into practice every day.

 This past week, I got to work with not one but two school librarians and chat about the school librarian domains and competencies!  Today, I’ll share with you highlights from my conversation with Christen McClain about AASL Shared Foundation IV: Curate, and then I’ll be back in a few days to dish on my chat with Brian Montero about AASL Shared Foundation VI: Engage.

Christen is one of the librarians at Midtown High School here in Atlanta, which is the high school that my middle school students at David T. Howard Middle School go on to attend.  I have had the extremely good fortune to volunteer with Christen for almost a decade at our children’s elementary school and then to work with her for two years at Inman Middle School (our school’s former name before we relocated).  I know that she is a whiz at curation!

Foundation IV is all about making meaning “by collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance” (AASL, 2018, p. 50).  As Christen explains, curation involves making information “user friendly,” and this means that knowing your community is critical!  “You have to be aware of your students’ preferences and pay attention to requests,” she notes.  You then use that information to organize your collection in a way that is logical and sensible to them as well as to make appropriate purchases for your collection.  It’s all about giving students the tools they need not just to find information but to create – to curate – their own learning!

One cool curation project that Christen has managed is using color coded labels to help students locate titles of interest.  As she explains, students often request information by category or subject –

          “How do I find a good horror book?”

                        “Where are the mysteries?”

“I love politics. What do you have?” 

And I have definitely experienced the same as Christen when students then “look at us funny when we say the books are arranged by author!”  Using colorful labels allows all the books to remain in the collection organized by author but also allows students to easily find materials of interest. 

Christen began work on this project when we worked together at Inman, and a library intern and I recently completed the labeling.  Christen is now planning to use the same basic color-coded system to label books at Midtown.  That way, students leaving my library at Howard Middle will walk into the library at Midtown and instantly feel a sense of familiarity with the curation system!

Photo of us back at Inman - our coworker Deborah on the left, Christen in the middle, and me on the right

Colorful labels for the project

Labeled books on the shelf at Howard

A guide to using the labels & finding books

This curation activity supports Domain A: Think by “designing opportunities for learners to explore possible information sources” and by modeling a way that students can organize their own information.

Christen and I also discussed that sometimes the challenge of curation is just not knowing about available resources, or, as she puts it, not “being informed on the depth or features” of tools that are available.  We had a great discussion of how I am using resource lists in Follett Destiny – the library management software used by both of our libraries - to curate information for my readers.  Look at us librarians - learning to curate from each other!

Stay tuned as I share more discussions with school librarians about how they are putting the AASL standards into practice every day!