Today I started the day with the usual shelving. Then I spent some time discussing some of the ways Ms. Schell and Ms. Gratto do collection development. This came up because earlier that day they had received a few boxes with sample non-fiction books from one of the publishers they have bought books from before. We talked about how they select books (does it relate to the curriculum? will it get checked out? is it too easy? too hard?) and how they pay for them. A lot of the books included were either too simple (and expensive) or too hard for middle schoolers, but Ms. Schell found a series about the different government agencies that she thought might be good to add to the collection. She explained that usually she takes the books to the teachers and asks them to peruse them and tell her if they would use them.
I also did a little bit of reader's advisory! I was walking around the library doing some shelving when a student asked me if I could help him find a novel about basketball or football. I suggested he do a keyword search in the catalog to see what we had. We found several options, but he kept asking me how long the books were (it seems that he was starting the work on an assignment pretty late and he needed to find a quick read). After spending some time looking through the results list, he picked "The Crossover" by Kwame Alexander.
