The new federal ConnectED initiative should bring fast connections to almost all schools and libraries within five years. The project, a combination of enhanced broadband connectivity and teacher development, aims to leverage private-sector innovations to benefit students. President Obama also highlighted the role of libraries as partners in improving digital citizenship. Now it’s up to us. What experiences could we provide to our students and patrons if we had superior broadband?

I have four personal Cs of connectivity: content, creation, community, and concurrency. The benefits of the first two are predictable. But the real power of ConnectED lies in the potential of the last two.

Content is the gift and curse of greater broadband. As bandwidth increases, content grows to fill network capacity. While we might imagine expanded content to mean more enriched ebooks and multimedia-enhanced databases, a huge portion of many school networks is clogged with security camera footage.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But libraries need to understand how network configurations and technologies like traffic shaping can provide better, consistent connectivity for all broadband traffic by throttling select bandwidth-hogging services. Security cameras, for example, could be capped at 30 percent of bandwidth. So streaming video to classrooms could have a guaranteed consistent level of performance.

There’s also the issue of net neutrality, which seeks a position that doesn’t favor content from certain Internet providers, and makes traffic-shaping technologies especially important to understand. Service providers could use these technologies to slow down access to content from competitors.

On to my next C. Increased bandwidth expands the capability to create. Schools and libraries could use new resources to publish student- and teacher-authored materials. Think flipped classrooms. Teacher lectures are being recorded with interactive whiteboards and/or cameras, and being pushed out for students to view outside of school. Libraries might record presentations to share with a broader audience, too.

This idea is inexorably linked to the third C: community. A school or library with gigabit broadband in a community without high-speed access will struggle. So, institutions must tackle community access issues first, perhaps even by becoming local hubs for Internet service delivery. Once things are running smoothly, schools and libraries could support their larger communities by providing high-tech services, content delivery, and the creation or publication of locally important content.

Finally, the “ConnectEDness” that comes with high-speed connectivity holds great potential. Approaching gigabit speeds, interactions start to feel concurrent. One can truly be present in real time, even from a distance, as opposed to experiencing the molasseslike lag of high latency. Imagine what libraries could do with that.

We could build a support network to create richer virtual author visits by providing a space in the local library with high-speed broadband. If every library had a multimedia studio space for creation, speakers could use the same hardware for high-quality virtual presentations that feel like a live experience.

This just scratches the surface of things to do with high-speed broadband. Now’s the time to dream big—and to talk big. Share ideas. Establish the need for bandwidth in libraries before it arrives. Then, cross your fingers and hope that ConnectED will push through the morass of politics.

A few months ago, Marie D’Onofrio, one of the school librarians I work with, told me she was going to buy some fiction ebooks. D’Onofrio, who works at Livonia (NY) High School, purchased four ebooks from Lerner’s Carolrhoda imprint. She wasn’t familiar with the titles, but took a chance anyway.

The students loved the books. That wasn’t surprising, since Carolrhoda has been producing award-winning books for more than 30 years. Still, for D’Onofrio, as for so many other school librarians, exploring fiction ebooks was a voyage into the unknown.

Why? Because the status of digital fiction in school libraries is still relatively undefined, compared with nonfiction, whose traction in schools is pretty established by now. Public libraries’ evolution toward incorporating fiction ebooks has received a lot of attention, but schools are still catching up.

Right now, K–12 offerings in fiction ebooks are largely restricted to titles from the big trade publishers offered on services such as OverDrive or packages of pre-selected titles like TumbleBooks. Our knowledge of authors and ebook titles from other fiction publishers is still foggy.

This summer, the haze will lift with the introduction of a new program called “Here Be Fiction” (HereBeFiction.org). The endeavor is a collaboration between my system, the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership, Mackin, and School Library Journal.

This is how it works. School librarians who use Here Be Fiction will be able to identify quality ebooks available from a wide variety of publishers such as Lerner, Charlesbridge, August House, and more. Users can browse ebook previews and reviews posted at HereBeFiction.org, enabling them to discover fiction from established sources. The site also offers school library-friendly licensing terms, with titles readily available for licensing by school libraries for both individual and multi-user access.

During the project’s first active phase, from July 15 to September 15, selected school librarians around the country will have free access during their summer vacations to read and review ebook fiction from participating publishers, using the secure Mackin VIA platform. Looking ahead, Here Be Fiction will again allow teachers to sample books for free during future school vacation times—and active reading phases—in the winter and spring.

Throughout the year, the website will be available to everyone, with open access to lists of titles, short previews, and reviews, all of which will help librarians and teachers find and select new content. Here Be Fiction will also feature author biographies, publisher overviews, and editorial content focusing on ways to use ebooks in classrooms and school libraries.

Active site visitors will find it easy to highlight and share books they discover via Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. They will also be able to create wish lists of featured books that can then be downloaded or sent directly to Mackin for a price quote.

The need for a program like Here Be Fiction has become more urgent this past year, as school librarians have faced increasing pressure to deliver ebook fiction for both student-selected reading and teacher-directed class use.

To meet school librarians’ unique needs, participating publishers must agree to three requirements:

1) They must provide either multi-user or individual access plans, with a discount for licensing multiple simultaneous readers. This way, ebooks can be used for class novels, book clubs, reading groups, and other group purposes.

2) Publishers must make ebooks available for offline access through a secure platform like Mackin VIA or a download with appropriate security. This enables the participation of students and schools with limited WiFi access.

3) They must, when possible, enable the use of text-to-speech functionality through the reading platform to support struggling readers or those with special needs.

The site launches this summer in limited beta format. Access will be made available to additional school librarian reviewers as quickly as possible.

Increasingly, less really is more. That said, we need strategies for presenting meaningful choices to our clients. In a recent TED talk, Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar shed light on how choice overload impacts our ability to make productive decisions. She also offered valuable tips on streamlining the information choices we present. Librarians can learn a lot from what she had to say.

Iyengar described an experiment she conducted involving different numbers of jam samples offered at a grocery store tasting. When there were 24 jams available for sampling, 20 percent more people stopped to sample than when only six jams were offered. But sampling is different from buying. Only three percent of people purchased a jam from the 24-jam sample test, while 30 percent bought a jar when presented with six choices.

Let’s pretend the jam jars are data that librarians are presenting to teachers. While teachers might be drawn in to a workshop that lets them sample from 24 databases, they are more likely to buy in to a database when offered just a few options.

Iyengar identified four ways to fight choice overload. These methods will help teachers make more effective use of your library.

1) Cut. Weeding your digital collection is as critical as weeding your physical books. Just because you can offer three or four controversial topic databases doesn’t mean you should. Evaluate the choices and pick one. Then spend time going deep into a single resource.

2) Concretize. We know that selecting a resource is more meaningful when we teach about it at the point of need. But this isn’t always realistic for librarians who are stretched thin. You can still make things concrete by creating short screen capture movies using free CamStudio software on Windows or the built in QuickTime Player in Mac OS.

3) Categorize. According to Iyengar, people felt they had more choices when presented with 400 options divided into 20 categories as opposed to 600 options spread across 10. Don’t make teachers or students guess what a resource is for. Separate them into specific subjects or use case groupings.

4) Start simple. Present users with smaller sets of options first and then work up to larger sets. In my training sessions, I start with a single broad reference resource and then show a few more choices for specific use scenarios (science resources, pro/con papers, etc). To focus on quality over quantity, consider adopting a single broad informational resource and then pick more selections targeted to specific projects, courses, or subjects.

Don’t overwhelm teachers by showing them everything. Remember, less really is more.

Illustration by Mark Tuchman

One option, championed by Jamie LaRue, director of Douglas County (CO) Libraries(DCL), is to pursue other sources of content. LaRue has struck deals with independent—meaning self-published—authors. DCL recently launched a deal to purchase titles from Smashwords, an aggregator and reseller of self-published content and so-called independent publishers, some of which offer hundreds of books on the site, while others publish just a couple titles. But the real problem is that most of the larger publishers and best-selling books on Smashwords deal in adult fiction—which is to say, erotica.

Even more troubling, in a recent interview by Publishers’ Weekly, LaRue was asked about DCL’s acquisition of children’s ebooks from Smashwords that were being made available with no review. “‘Can we vet every children’s book before we add it? I am not sure that we can,” LaRue responded, noting that he suspects DCL might “get stung once or twice.” This laissez faire approach simply will not cut it in school libraries. Truly inappropriate books in schools result in lawsuits, not minor stings.

I understand LaRue’s frustration and his desire to work actively toward a solution. Yet the maxim of quality over quantity certainly applies here. Publishers serve a critical role in the information ecosystem and are especially important for school libraries.

Unlike public and academic libraries, which have whole departments dedicated to new title acquisition, school librarians largely work alone. Even if we don’t always realize it, we rely on publishers to help with book selection. It’s the publishers who bear the cost of paying people to read the thousands of manuscripts submitted each year. Publishers pay for someone to then work with the selected authors to ensure that the books are accurate, grammatical, and appropriate in content and reading level for the intended audience. We’re left with the relatively easy task of having to select from the small percentage of books that make it through the established publishing houses each year. Our biggest challenge is that there always seem to be more books that we want than we can afford.

Imagine for a second if, instead of just having to consider among a few thousand vetted and professionally produced books, you had to wade through exponentially more choices? There are about 20,000 children’s and young adult books listed on Smashwords, but are any of them worth your time? The highest reviewed children’s book, Storm and the Magic Saddle, has 12 5-star reviews. But on deeper examination, I found only 10 actual reviews (two are duplicates), and only one of those reviewers has assessed any other books. There are also two reviews with no rating that question the accuracy of the information about horsemanship in the book as well as the age-appropriateness of the writing.

It all seems so, well, unprofessional. Given the publishers, aggregators, and professional review sources like SLJ that we’ve come to rely on, I just can’t believe that self-publishing is ever going to be the next big thing for libraries. Not when there are so many other great books still waiting to be read from the expert and established publishers with whom we already work.

Photo by Sarah Reid (www.flickr.com/photos/sarahreido).

School librarians remain deeply divided over Dewey, but for most, its staying power is a matter of practicality. While the system is flawed, a complete overhaul of all those call numbers and spine labels is simply impossible. And yet, given CC’s requirements around informational texts, it makes sense for us to consider whether or not our current classification system best serves students’ interests. Dewey’s venerable system has supposedly been updated for our changing times—by adding even more places after the decimal. That’s hardly ideal for helping elementary school students find books. But with some technology and creative problem solving, relabeling an entire collection won’t be necessary.

Beyond Dewey, there are bigger changes afoot. MARC, the structure underlying the library catalog, is being challenged by a new metadata model: the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The scheme promises to provide not only a richer description of content, but also lends greater context to how specific content relates to other pieces of information. To learn more, visit the Library of Congress’s Bibliographic Framework initiative.

Beyond describing what a work is about, RDF and the Bibliographic Framework show users where they can find books and other materials locally. Holdings can have multiple location fields for Dewey, LC, and other classification schemes. Through semantic linking, one could also display the subject terms for a particular Dewey number. So there’s your subject-based cataloging without having to re-catalog.

There’s already a tool you can try that provides the subject-term equivalents for the top 1,100+ DDS numbers: dewey.info, a project of OCLC, steward of the DDS. So rather than chuck Dewey altogether, make use of the well-established subject hierarchy behind the numbers to update your library classification. Label shelf ranges and shelves with subject terms to help browsing students explore their interests without having to recreate every spine label and call number.

In the end, any evolutionary changes to library organization will require the support of industry service providers. Again, time becomes an issue if book jobbers don’t adopt a given system, requiring local processing. It isn’t reasonable to expect jobbers to be able to support a range of classification systems. For any system to be truly effective, it also needs to be supported by the online catalogs used by our students. Therefore it’s critical that AASL (the American Association of School Librarians) works together with vendors to address this issue.

As a wise colleague suggested, perhaps the best way to move forward with this discussion is to put the sacred cows back to pasture and simply sit down and talk about how we can best connect readers with books. No matter what classification system tickles your fancy, as long as we all agree that helping kids find books they love is our shared mission, then we can work together toward a common solution.

It made sense to band together to buy ebooks as a single region rather than purchasing as 22 small districts. Buying as a group helped, but our rural schools still didn’t have new money to spend on ebooks. For this project, a blended-funding solution meant starting with librarians, allocating a portion of their existing state library materials aid to the regional purchases while seeking additional resources from classroom or textbook funding.

The goal was twofold: pool money from individual libraries to leverage group purchasing, and increase the efficient use of existing funding. New York State provides $6.25 in state aid per student to each district for library materials. Asking librarians to give up even 10 percent or 20 percent of their limited book budgets was met with entirely reasonable resistance. For this plan to work, participating librarians had to retain control of their money throughout the selection process.

Working together with our librarians, we found inspiration in crowd-sourced funding sites like Kickstarter.com. On Kickstarter, people post projects to raise money from individual donors. For example, the Harvey Pekar Estate crowd-funded the creation of a memorial statue of the comic book author for the Cleveland Heights public library. Kickstarter’s site tracks pledges until the fundraising goal is reached. Then, people who pledged are charged and the project receives the money. We thought we could use a similar crowd-funding method to let librarians select books in a consortium.

The process we settled on is based on the regional price break point, when the number of individual libraries buying the ebook for their building meets the cost of buying the book for the whole region. For example, an ebook might cost one library $20 and the region $200. If 10 libraries plan on buying that book, we might as well pool the money and buy it for the region. Our selection tool is built around pledges; librarians indicate that they would allocate their money to buy the book individually. When the number of pledges reaches the set break point, the book is purchased for the region by pulling in the pledges, which will fund it.

This couldn’t have worked without three keys. First, our member librarians helped us find a delicate balance between a library giving up some limited funding and retaining control. We also credit the publishers that were willing to consider a new business model and provide regional pricing: ABC-CLIO, Britannica, Chelsea House, Lerner, and Rosen. The final key was Mackin, which worked with publishers on pricing to make this regional buying possible. Mackin’s VIA platform for digital content will give the kids in our region easy access to the collection on computers, iPads, and Android tablets.

Working through an aggregator was a deliberate choice. I might have been able to get lower prices directly from publishers and my amazing team could probably have developed a reading platform, but I wanted this project to be replicable and sustainable. I believe that this model can work for districts and consortia around the country.

Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) Educational Partnership.

In the tablet market, the push to unseat the iPad had competitors slapping an HD tag on every supersize device they produced, while Apple went small, releasing its seven-inch iPad Mini in October.

Nothing small about ebook prices for libraries, with Random House tripling prices for that market, with $28 titles ratcheted to $84, and Hachette doubling prices on their backlisted titles. Amazon finally devised a school model—but using it as intended violates their terms of service.

So what’s in store for 2013? I see three key areas: changing ebook business models, access to more content, and affordable new hardware. The first two points are strongly linked. By exploring new business models, we could access collections of resources, which have been previously unavailable to schools. To make this work, we have to find ways to overcome the roadblocks to ebook lending experienced by public libraries.

School libraries, I believe, will be the coming focal point for ebook licensing. We have strong relationships with our K–12 publishing partners, but now we must reach out to the trade houses. As the print market weakens, the time is right for schools to present a new business proposal.

The fact is, the big trade houses aren’t very keen on “selling” ebooks to libraries. To justify its $84 ebooks, Random House implied that libraries owned the titles, but applied so many restrictions that ownership was effectively obviated by all the fine print.

So let’s give them another option. Rather than seeking to own ebooks, school libraries should instead seek more favorable deals in a short-term lease market. Support classroom instruction with two-month book rentals, or license titles for three-year terms to avoid locking the school into endless recycling of the same novels.

If publishers are concerned about the impact on consumer sales, we can point out that these ebooks are for instructional use and not pleasure reading. By writing licenses that restrict ebook use in classroom settings, we’re giving up some access but opening up a huge new world of content. Besides, we can always buy print books for independent reading.

Finally, 2013 should be an exciting year for hardware. By year’s end, I expect we’ll see sub-$100 tablets, not knock-off brands, but fully supported devices akin to the Kindle and Nook. We might also see color digital ink readers with better support for illustrated books. But the main hardware issue will be accessibility. Two high-profile lawsuits in 2012 established that schools and libraries purchasing ebook readers must buy accessible devices. Currently, none of the E-Ink based devices (Kindle Paperwhite or Nook Simple Touch, for example) are accessible, according to ADA definitions. Make sure your district considers accessibility if it’s planning to buy mobile computing and reading devices this year.

 Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) Educational Partnership.

Arriving on the scene together—and even worse, on the tails of declining budgets for schools and libraries nationwide—these two factors present a real challenge. Fortunately, we also have some real opportunities ahead thanks to collaborative, solutions-focused thinking at the Summit. The gathering brings together school librarians, publishers, aggregators, and vendors to talk about vital issues and, more importantly, to discover the answers to today’s big questions.

A key question relating to the perfect storm of collection development is, of course, funding. Where will the money for new CC resources come from? How will we pay for new digital resources? Likely not from a new pot of money. But that doesn’t mean we can’t access funding that’s “new” to the library.

One approach is to look for existing funds within your school and district that can be redirected so that your library can purchase CC resources for the classroom. Eric Fitzgerald, Capstone Publishing’s vice president of direct sales, encouraged Summit attendees to seek out this kind of “blended funding.”

Blended funding means asking the English department to kick in some classroom or textbook money to help support that new literary criticism resource. Blended funding means pointing out to the elementary school principal that many of the new interactive ebook series are replacing science and social studies textbooks… so maybe they should be partially funded by the textbook budget. Blended funding isn’t a foolproof solution, but it’s a solid tactic. One challenge: it requires that you market your expertise in resource selection and collection development so that your value is obvious to others.

You also must, as they say, have skin in the game. Before you go asking for additional funds from departmental, textbook, or classroom budgets, make sure you’re ready to talk about the percentage of the cost that will be covered by the library budget. It’s a lot easier to sell someone on splitting the cost than it is to ask them to pay for the whole shebang.

When crafting your appeal for blended funding support, the other key component to address is efficiency. Remember, the library budget isn’t “our” budget; rather we’re centrally managing funds to enable more efficient purchases of resources to support classroom teaching and learning. Given the widespread need for new CC-aligned resources, libraries can work with publishers and aggregators to deliver wider access to content by going digital. One of our most powerful arguments is that we can save our organizations money by sharing resources and purchasing in larger consortia to reduce costs and increase access. The science teachers in a district or region aren’t set up to leverage group purchasing, but librarians are.

From my perspective as a school administrator, this is the perfect solution to a perfect storm. Everyone is desperate for content; now it’s our time to step up and deliver. We have the infrastructure, business relationships, and great publishers and aggregators to work with us. We just need to apply blended funding to make it happen for everyone.

Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) Educational Partnership.

Over the past few months, the American Library Association (ALA) and its president, Maureen Sullivan, have taken a hard stance with major publishers on the issue of ebooks in libraries. ALA’s attention has been directed at the so-called “big six,” some of whom still refuse to sell ebooks to libraries. While there isn’t much call for a hardline approach with small, independent publishers of K–12 ebooks, there’s one issue I’d like to address.

Author Christopher Harris has created a PDF detailing the digital content pricing challenges faced by small, rural schools like the districts he serves in the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership in Western New York.

Under the building- or site-based pricing terms that many K–12 publishers use, the small, rural school districts that I serve are being overcharged for digital content. So these districts—with an average size of 1,100 students and less than half the budget of the average New York school district—are, in effect, subsidizing the state’s large, wealthy, suburban systems, which are purchasing the same content at the same cost per building.

We aren’t the only ones who are paying more than our fair share. According to the United States Census Bureau, about half of our nation’s school districts have fewer than 5,000 students; but our collective voice is small and our individual impact on the market is even smaller.

Publishers are being challenged as well. In the days before ebooks exploded onto the scene, publishers expected to sell lots of print books to lots of schools. Big schools and small ones, wealthy and poor, if they wanted the content, they bought the book. And it didn’t matter if the shelf the book sat on was faded plywood or gleaming mahogany; only one student at a time could read a print title. In the digital world, this has changed. Our publisher partners have been forward thinking enough to sell us content with unlimited, simultaneous access. This deserves a huge thank-you—and a second look at the economics of this model.

Digital content is being sold at the building level, but often without consideration for the size of that building. For example, my region has 22 small districts with a total of 54 schools. When content is priced by building, our region ends up being charged as much as neighboring systems with almost twice as many students, but a comparable number of buildings. We need a new way to look at pricing content that considers not buildings, but the student population therein.

One solution might be to consider the average school building size for each state. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) publishes lists of average elementary and secondary school sizes that can easily be incorporated into a pricing formula. My region, for instance, has 27 elementary school buildings, but according to NCES, that’s equivalent to 19 elementary schools, according to the New York average. Under an average-school pricing model, we would be charged for 19 elementary schools when looking at a regional purchase.

In the print era, we probably would have bought 37 copies of a book, but they would have been limited to 37 users. With digital content, when the potential use is expanded to an entire school, it’s only fair that the population be considered in pricing. By using a formula based on average-school pricing, we can help ensure equity of access to schools and students in small, rural districts.

Podcasting was all the rage a few years ago, but these days, video reigns supreme. In New York’s recently released Common Core (CC) exemplar modules for English Language Arts, about half of the tasks required of students in grades three to five either expressly stipulate video or lend themselves perfectly to a video assignment. So under CC, students will be writing scripts, reviewing books, making public service announcements, and creating other content, all using video. For schools, this presents a technical challenge: Where to host all this video?

Luckily, I found a solution. Over the summer, we had to review our video streaming after our provider lost the rights to some critical content, and we were less than satisfied with the remaining options. So we decided to handle this ourselves, streaming content we already owned. With the thousands of dollars we would have spent on a subscription, we could acquire the material that best met our region’s instructional needs. Next, we had to host and stream all of this content without being overwhelmed by the resulting increase in workload.

While my team’s technical expertise is high on the geek end of the scale, we’re always concerned about taking on new tasks. Every system we have to maintain takes time away from real innovation. For our Digital Media Festival, we developed an open-source solution to convert, host, and stream video. With Drupal providing the base site, we turned to FFmpeg to convert the files into a Web-streaming format and JWPlayer for a combined Flash and HTML5 (for iPad) player. Still, we didn’t want that project to become a full-time mission. So we turned to the cloud.

Vimeo has been streaming video since late 2004; it actually launched four months before YouTube. The first video-sharing site to offer HD playback, it’s remained a favorite destination for commercial hosting. With Vimeo’s PRO hosting service option (vimeo.com/pro), there’s a flat rate for video streaming. For $199 a year, you get up to 50GB of storage and 250,000 video playbacks. Add another 50GB of storage for an additional $199 a year. Need more playbacks? Another 250,000 is, no surprises here, just an additional $199 for the year. From a budgetary perspective, knowing exactly how much this costs sure beats a flexible rate for storage and playbacks.

The up-front cost for the PRO service includes priority video uploads, the conversion of files to Vimeo’s format, and loads of security options. While uploading a large collection can be a bit of a pain—the Web uploader only takes five videos at a time—the process isn’t all that bad. The ability to drag and drop files onto the page in the browser speeds things up a lot. If you allow it, users can download your clips.

With PRO accounts, you can turn off the Community Pass, which means your content won’t show up in searches and can’t be played on Vimeo’s site. You can also specify which domains on which the videos can be embedded on. This level of security is what allows us to host our licensed content on Vimeo.

So go forth and create video without worrying about where to host and stream it. Vimeo PRO will have you covered on the technical side and it provides generous storage capacity and playbacks for $199 a year. This represents the best of the cloud. A basic service that we could do ourselves, but nowhere as easily or as cheaply as Vimeo PRO does.

Librarians are masters of information. Finding it, storing it, organizing it, retrieving it—you name it. We excel at a wide range of skills. And in today’s world, that’s the name of the game.

Case in point: my team and I were recently asked to choose passages of text for a regional K–8 English language-arts exam. We were charged with coming up with six pairs of high-quality, Lexile-leveled narrative/informational passages for each grade—108 selections in all—in a little over a week. Were it not for our information and technology skills—and our knowledge of copyright—we could never have pulled it off.

Just trying to organize 108 passages in folders on a drive wouldn’t have cut it; from the start, we needed an information management system. Enter Drupal. As I’ve noted in previous columns, the open-source framework has become essential to our library work, providing all the back-end tools necessary to create online forms and reports for gathering and presenting information.

For this project, I built a free quick-and-dirty website at drupalgardens.com. Using just the basic tools, I was able to create an organization system, with the required fields: the book’s title, author, Lexile level, genre, word count, and the text of the passage itself, plus a checkbox for whether or not the passage had been selected. Then I built two views, called “reports” in Drupal. The first view showed all of the books entered on the site’s front page, with a dropdown menu to select individual grade levels. The second, a sidebar, displayed the number of books that had been entered and the passages that had been selected for each grade, giving us a quick view on our progress toward thse 108 passages.

It just goes to show, when the going gets tough, librarians get organized. By taking a couple of hours up front to build a site, the four of us were able to keep track of our work. When we completed the project, we were able to provide hard copies of each passage formatted to display its title, author, Lexile level, the text itself, and word count. I’d highly recommend taking the time up front to build a similar system if you’re ever presented with a similar task or any scenario where you need to gather and organize books, articles, or other content.

The final tool in our arsenal: resources for determining quality books from which to select passages. Beyond a Lexile search, we turned to Junior Library Guild’s back lists, Mackin Compendium lists, and SLJ and Horn Book reviews. For us, this amounted to standard research procedure, but it sure looked like magic to those who had requested the materials.

The broader takeaway here is that, once again, librarians saved the day. By drawing upon our unique information skills, my team and I were able to complete an incredibly challenging task in a very short amount of time. The more often we can each come through like heroes (beyond shelving books) the better for our entire profession.

Two librarians take a crack at a new classification system, free to download

Miller invited me along for the reclassification of her elementary school library. This allowed me not only to help create the new system, but to bring back a firsthand report of the journey. And folks, it’s a wild ride.

We began by reclassifying animals. Our guiding principle throughout was to be as user friendly as possible. Animal books tend to be a large and very popular section with elementary kids, so it seemed like a good place to start.

But what’s the best way to shelve books about animals? We quickly decided that we’d bring all of them together in a single section. There would still be a split between wild and domesticated creatures, but at least the two groups could be shelved together. With that squared away, we sat and stared at each other, trying to decide what the heck to do with the actual animals. Shelve by scientific class? Biome? Name? Each method has a long list of pros and cons. As we soon learned, classification is really just a series of compromises that inevitably results in a less than perfect solution.

We settled on shelving wild animals by scientific classification. That way, similar creatures would be grouped together, for the most part, whereas shelving by biome would have split elephants into grassland (African) and jungle (Asian). While shelving by name may work for primary school collections, for upper elementary grades and beyond, the emphasis is on biological classes.

After some research—OK, a quick Wikipedia search—we decided to go with the following groupings: amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates.

Within each section, wild animals are shelved alphabetically by family, using the common name and then by species, again by common names. For example, books about black, brown, grizzly, or polar bears are shelved in that order under “Bears,” given the common family “Ursidae.” Again, Wikipedia helps, but there are still decisions to make. There are 35 different scientific families of sharks spread across eight distinct and larger orders, but for the elementary library we just put them all under “Sharks.”

We also considered other areas of the elementary school library and devised eight top-level areas: the living world, STEM, healthy living, the arts, play, social studies, languages, and fiction.

Our primary goal was to be student-friendly, but we also recognized the importance of curriculum in the library. Grouping books by how subjects are taught will help students find them more easily. For example, mythologies have been moved into the “fiction for lack of a better word right now” section along with folktales, legends, and books on ghosts and aliens. We hope that placing these books in more heavily browsed sections will increase readership.

See below for our complete classification system (or download it as a separate document). Tell us what you think in the comments below.

By Kristie Miller and Christopher Harris