First International School Library Day

18 October 1999

ISLD99 LogoA Day in the Life... Stories and Anecdotes from School Library Personnel Around the World

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Eric Azgaldov (Russia)
Wednesday 26 April 2000

Lyubov V. Shkapar is a school librarian in the city of Krasnoyarsk in southeastern Siberia, Russia. The city was founded in 1628 as a frontier fortress on the bank of the river Yenisei, one of the largest in Russia. It has grown to be a major industrial, transport, and cultural centre with a population of over 900 000. This is an area characterized by long and inclement winters and short and hot summers.
Trained as a librarian, in 1981 Lyuba came to work at School 7, one of the city's best as well as largest, with a curriculum emphasis on maths and science. It has 1400 pupils (grades 1 through 11) and 98 teachers.
Like the vast majority of ordinary secondary schools in Russia, Lyuba's school has only the phone for communication.
Don't Fence Me Around with the Chinese Wall --
There Are War and Peace's Enough for All! or
Lyrical and Ironical Notes on a Russian School Librarian's Workday

It is morning. The time of great expectations and grand plans, when you feel as if you can move mountains. As usual, I am hurrying off to school to open my library.
What is the most important thing I have today? The seventh graders are holding a conference-cum-reflection, Alexander Grin: Dreams and Reality. I must look through the questions and get into the right mood.
Hey, what do these kids mean by being up so early? It s not yet eight and they are already hanging around the library. Why, it s Grade 6G. Their first lesson has been called off, but instead of grabbing some sleep, they will come to the library with the express purpose of reading journals and sharing information. There are my darlings! I am not going to grudge them an early admittance.
My, what a crowd! Moreover, this is not all -- the whole Grade 2B is about to come rushing in. And every one of them wants Maruska the Cat. Children! Silence please, PLEASE! We shall find something for everyone, and your teacher will be happy. Seems like I can serve all of them.
The sound of tramping feet again. Where do you come from? Another lesson has been cancelled; their teacher is ill. That s it. For one whole hour, the library looks and sounds like a beehive, the kids rummaging through journals and encyclopedias, and looking into every corner. I may just as well forget about having some quiet or thinking over questions for the coming Grin conference.
Well, the conference went off quite well, the dreams winning over the reality.
Running feet again! Oh, but this is an altogether different weight category.
Isn't it Pushkin you want? No, you do not want Pushkin, and the teacher was quite clear about it: Stories by the late author Belkin. This misunderstanding keeps recurring year after year. Well, Pushkin wins this time. I succeed in convincing the boy that Pushkin is the author of Stories by the Late Ivan P. Belkin.
Don't fence me about with the Chinese wall -- there are enough copies of War and Peace for all! Why do you look so unhappy? You remember War and Peace as not so thick and having a red cover? It must have been War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells. You are mixing up your books, poor thing.
Somebody is running in again. It's the phone. Who might it be? I am sure I've distributed all the textbooks among the schools, having myself nothing else to order. And I have collected all the material for my library from the District Education Department. Oh, it's the methodologist asking me to come down and get the textbooks in a hurry.
I guess I ve got to go. But what about the transportation? The school can offer no other vehicle to carry textbooks than the Full Day Group pupils. Centipedes, my colleagues call them. Well, come to my rescue, kids!
Ooh! It's over at last. The textbooks go to the stacks, and I am in the library. I could certainly do with a catnap, but it is quite impossible to do so.
Children! So, you have come running for the umpteenth time already, and you are lucky to find me in at last! Pick your books, rummage in the card index, and read all you like. In the meantime, I'll try to catch my breath.
It seems everybody is gone. What time is it now? Three. Grade 2A is about to come. They are on a strict regime, and their teacher only lets them off at this time. How bright they are, how many interesting things they know! They will be leafing through every scholarly journal and explaining to me about the tokamac, and the different kinds of chips. Also about the most faithful dogs and the most poisonous plants. No, whatever you may say, life is interesting when you have someone to share your joy with. Wasn't it Rabindranath Tagore who said that what makes a library big is not the size of its stock but its friendliness.
The day is over. How much could I do? Not much. But tomorrow will be another day -- then shall I finish it all. What do you think?

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Folke Dahlqvist (Sweden), First School Librarian, Jönköping, Sweden
Thursday, October 28, 1999 2:15 AM

We want to tell you about our web page so that librarians all over the world can inform themselves about our Library Caravan (otherwise known as Karlavagnen -- The Wheeling School Library). We hope to see you in Malmo at the IASL conference in August 2000!

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Mr. A. Camilleri (Malta)
Teacher/Librarian, F.X. Attard Boys' Secondary School, Marsa, Malta
Wednesday, 27 October 1999 21:27:57 +0200

I am sending this letter to inform you that on the 18th October 1999 the first International School Library Day was celebrated. An event was therefore organised whereby the students, which number to 400 in all, donated some 100 books to the school library which their other mates can themselves borrow.

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Judy Davies (Canada)
Tuesday, October 19, 1999 at 08:31:10 PST.

I have been reading all the wonderful submissions (a day later). It is wonderful to read about and view so many wonderful things happening through school libraries world-wide! I live and work in Canada's smallest province, Prince Edward Island. After many years as a teacher-librarian at the elementary level, I am presently working as a resource-based learning consultant for the PEI Department of Education. We have a VERY active school library community in this province, PEITLA has around 50 members (and there are only 65 schools in the entire province!)

This year I am co-teaching a distance education course with my colleague, Dr. Ray Doiron (Faculty of Education, University of Prince Edward Island). This is the introductory course in our Diploma Program in School Librarianship. We are delighted to have twenty (very keen) people participating in this course... I hope that some of them have been reading the messages concerning International School Library Day too!

We are also in the midst of "re-packaging" all our support for PEI school libraries. This includes an imminent Minister's Directive and Standards (replacing our earlier provincial policy and guidelines) and an online curriculum support document called, Building Information Literacy. The documents will be distributed within a great new "PEI School Library Handbook," beginning a 6 week system-wide consultation period before everything becomes "official." We have a wonderful (provincial) standing committee and the members have been working very hard to make all of this possible. Yes, we are having a very busy time here in Prince Edward Island but we feel we are keeping school libraries on "the front burner!" Good luck to all of you in your own projects and initiatives!
Judy Davies
Resource-Based Learning Consultant, PEI Department of Education, Canada
(Director, Association for Teacher-Librarianship in Canada)

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Midnight, Monday 18 October 1999 (in Reykjavik, Iceland)

Greetings to all from the Webmaster, at the end of our first ever International School Library Day!. Thank you to the contributors of "A Day in the Life..." stories. Greetings to those school library associations now holding celebrations in countries where the evening is a little younger than it is here. And if you think International School Library Day is a Good Thing, then start thinking about what could be done to celebrate the day in 2000!

If any readers would still like to contribute a "Day in the Life..." story (and/or pictures), then I will be happy to add your material to these pages over the next week or so. The instructions are on this Web site. It could not be easier! Your story and/or pictures will be added above this message, so that it acts as a kind of "end marker". When you reach this message, the stories end! However, this is not the end of this international activity. The January 2000 issue of the IASL journal School Libraries Worldwide will continue the theme of "A Day in the Life...", with more stories from school library personnel around the world.

Over the next few days, I will create a small author and country index to the stories on this Web site, so that you can find individual contributions (including your own) more easily. In addition, a link to the stories will remain on the School Libraries Online home page, though in a new position towards the bottom of the page.

Very best wishes,
Anne Clyde, IASL Webmaster

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Last Updated 19 April 2003 (LAC)