Transcript
SARAH:
When you're putting together a collection policy, I think it's really important to bear in mind the diverse community with which we're serving. So we need to encompass all students. And a good way to do this is to look at the school mission statement and the wider aims and goals of the school. So, for example, we might change our collection according to the age of our students. Whether they have English as an additional language. We also might be looking at the gender, the ethnicity, the accessibility and also the interest levels.
For example, I worked in a boys' school, and the fiction was definitely biased towards war and adventure. The slant was in that direction. And that wouldn't be the same in all schools. I also worked in an international school, and they're the country that the school was based in had to be very careful about the content of some of the books that were on the shelves.
The other thing is about students with special needs and accessibility. We need to make sure that the resources are in the right format. So if you worked in a school maybe where people were visually impaired, you might have a larger collection of audio books or large prints or even Braille.
We also have to think about how we're going to display these resources. There are some areas that might be more sensitive. For example, if you've got some students that are in the LGBTQ community. Or perhaps we've got students as well who've got mental health issues or are being bullied then we might need to think that perhaps they're not going to come up and ask us openly for these books. We need to make sure that they are somewhere they can find them but with discretion.
Collections of resources that we have in our policy they've got to be dynamic. We've got to think about where we're going to get them from. I mean, it's great going to publishers and charity shops where you can buy things at discount value. We need to think about things. Are we going to have multiple copies or are we just going to stick to single issues of a fiction book? What if it's very popular? We need to think about how we're going to cull our collection on a regular basis.
And I always think it's a really good idea to review what we've got annually. Look at the policy. Look at the school mission statements. Look at the dynamics of our students and our staff and plan accordingly.