ETL503 Resourcing the Curriculum - The beginning

The thought of doing a subject over the Christmas break seemed like a good idea, until I realised that I would have both kids at home for a majority of it! Oh well, 'thems the breaks'. I was looking at the assessment pieces and thinking this is going to be a lot of work but this is an area that I need more clarity on - I am fairly sure in my interviews for jobs it is my understanding (or lack of) that limits my ability to 'nail' it.

I think one of the main aspects I have to get my head around is the digital collection - especially reviewing and see if it suits my school. It seems easy enough to look at this with the print collection but I seem to run out of time with the digital side and I know this is a problem as we head towards a digital library scene.

I started by reading the first section of Chapter 1 - What is collection management? and found that this matches what we consider collection management in our schools - again I have to make sure I go through our guidelines a little more thoroughly for this subject! I continued reading the next section and was interested in how the two terms developed and for what reasons. It seemed a little pedantic to change the term as I am sure that as libraries were doing collection development there was the management side to it too, so to introduce collection management then and have the confusion or synonomous meanings occuring seemed likely. What I will take from this is as our module states, 'advisable to detect and take into account' the differences when people are writing about them. This will be the main issue with me I think is to have it clear in my head what they are meaning with the use of the term they have chosen.

I did like the alternate definitions in our notes where it linked it to school libraries with teaching and learning aspects and the needs of the users.

Finally, I examined and considered the definitions of 'selection', 'acquisition', 'deselection' and 'collection evaluation' and thought that for the student interest side of needs of the users of a library these are fairly standard - but that for curricular needs and teaching practices/learning theories there requires to be a knowledge of the units teachers are teaching, quite difficult when I am there one day a week and with teachers who haven't used a TL in that way before. So even though we have a Guidelines document for policy and procedure it is generic and I am looking forward to putting some school level documents in there.