Final reflection

My participation in the forums/ other tasks. 
In general I think my participation in the forums has been less than I would have liked. As I am teaching in classroom for the first time in several years at a new grade level and teaching new subjects I have felt that I am constantly behind, and that by the time I come to the discussion other people have said all those things that I want to say. I hesitate to post comment merely agreeing with others, so this leaves me with little postable content. What I have found very valuable is sharing and discussing what I am learning with our teacher Librarian. 

That being said, I have found much of the course content to be very interesting despite some repetition from previous courses.

Before I started this course I assumed that the Organization of Learning Resources involved the physical placement of physical objects in the physical space of the library. So I was not surprised to know we were going to learn about the Dewey Decimal system. I was surprised about how much of organization is ideological, technical, digital and virtual. It was also interesting to me that our last module asked us to consider changes to our physical space.
Throughout the last few months I have, of course, learned more new vocabulary and acronyms than I could have imagined, CIP, AARC, and MARC 21, to name a few, and am very glad that the “Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science” exists so that I can continue to look up terms as I continue through the library program.
the exercise in creating a digital collection was a very good one. I realized that I did get bogged down in the searching and did not give myself enough time to do an adequate  job on the MARC records themselves. I know that teachers all over the school are collecting and bookmarking digital resources that they use in their classes. A library website would be an ideal venue in which the TL could help curate a collection of resources that would fit local curriculum and reflect teaching that is actually being done in our school. In this way the TL can provide a bridge between the diverse classrooms all over the school. Examining the school library websites to be found found on Joyce Valenza’a wiki point to how the school library website can provide a platform for that collaboration and collection building.
I finally learned what a MARC record was for. Creating the MARC records was also a challenging issue. I don’t feel as if I really did them justice, as I kept finding new information about various tags. I found it really difficult to synthesize all of the information I was finding. I don’t understand why there is not a single source for information about creating records, especially about digital resources and non-print resources. While I was an acting TL I acquired resources and added them to our catalog, used copy cataloging (not that I knew that is what I was doing at the time), as well as using the simple forms in Destiny to create original records. I did this without any training and without any understanding of how these records worked. I now appreciate how the fields in the form relate to the MARC record and how these  relation to access points and searching the collection with the OPAC. I am also now able  to better identify whether an imported  record is adequate, if and how it might be edited in order to improve access to that particular resource. I also rtynow understand what the z-search function is all about. I have also learned that we could have a union catalog that has nothing to do with CUPE.
The web and internet related parts course have also been very illuminating. I was pleased to learn more about crawling and human powered directories, as I was in principal aware of how Google provided search results it had never occurred to me to read its statement on how a website gets onto a search results list.  Delicious and other social networking sites seem to be a 21st century answer to the 20th’s Open Directory. 

Even now as we are finishing this course, after we spent a lot of time talking about all the elements of library organization the cataloging and processing, the idea that I keep coming back to  out of all the modules that we've done is the concept of access. A lot of my contemplation of these issues have been centered on how choices that I as the teacher librarian make have a direct impact on students (and others) access to the library and its materials. Choosing not to purchase certain items, choosing to shelve items in a certain way, choosing what call number to assign to an item, choosing to focus on one particular issue rather than something else, all of these things have impact on students access to library materials. 
Much of this course also prompts one to consider the future of libraries. Should we continue to use the Dewey decimal system or shelve thing more like a bookstore. Can we create a digital collection through the cataloging of digital resources. How can a website be used to enhance the access of students to the library?  Exploring the idea of a learning commons is very intriguing. When I read articles such as “Flip that Library: libraries need a revolution, not evolution”  I am struck by all the possibilities that there are for libraries to maintain their relevance into the future.

Although some of the topics that we've covered in this course of this course are issues that have and will be covered in other library courses is has only been through the more detailed examination of the cataloging that the true scope of the teacher librarians job has become apparent to me. The teacher part of the teacher librarian’s role, the team teaching, project and resource based learning elements are things that as a teacher we have experienced.  Reading the discussion forums about the wide variety of situations that teacher librarians come across in British Columbia has also been very interesting. To note how different districts deal with the technical aspects of the library point possibly to the need for some kind of ministry of education guidelines around minimum library staffing in order to ensure consistent access to libraries for all students in British Columbia.