What issues are schools facing in resourcing the curriculum?
During 2013 SCIS has been conducting informal surveying of school library staff who attend workshops, asking them the free text question:
What are your current collection issues?
This survey closed at the end of Term 3 with a total of 85 respondents. The results were then coded, revealing what the researcher saw as 16 distinct issues.
While the frequency of each category being mentioned in a response is shown in the table below, the goal of the pre-survey was to collect a range of responses from which to prepare a more in-depth survey. The fact that respondents were attending a cataloguing professional learning activity at the time of completing this survey question, may well explain the high occurrence of ‘cataloguing’ as an issue.
Categories
- cataloguing 14%
catalogue records for resources are unavailable or unsatisfactory - e-resources 13%
e-resources are not available, or not managed or used appropriately - time 9%
time to manage resources is limited and/or wasted - library system 7%
system does not meet school’s needs - promotion 7%
resources are not promoted to staff and students - budget 6%
budget for resources is inadequate - staff 6%
staff responsible for managing resources are not doing this effectively or do not exist - technology 6%
technology required to use curriculum resources is not available and/or inadequate - search 5%
finding what resources the school has, and where they are located, is difficult - weeding 5%
weeding of resources does not occur regularly - access 4%
access to resources is inadequate - age of collection 4%
outdated resources are retained - balance 4%
balance between print and digital resources is lacking - collection use 4%
staff and students do not use school resources - OPAC use 3%
staff and students do not use OPAC to find resources - professional learning 3%
professional learning in resourcing the curriculum required
What’s next?
You can contribute to the next stage of this research by responding to the survey at: www.surveymonkey.com/s/scisresearch.