End of Year Reflections

I just watched Buffy Hamilton's  Animoto Annual Report, and it's fantastic.  I definitely plan to steal the idea...next year.  I have been absolutely horrible about taking photos throughout the year, something I plan to work on.

In fact, I really need to do a better job with the whole advocacy thing in general. While I write an annual report, I haven't done much else to keep my principal/s informed about what I'm doing.  Partly because we're a small school, so it's fairly obvious, though that's an assumption I make.  Frankly, my teachers love me,  and  I  rely on that more than I should for word of mouth.

If you can't tell from my slough of weekend posts, I'm working through my sadly backlogged Google Reader, which prompted my whole thinking about my abysmally bad job of advocacy when I ran across Doug Johnson's recent post, Nobody Can Save Your Butt But You.   In this day and age, no one can afford to be complacent.  Some resources I've been reading as I prepare to write my annual report, and continue my thinking about revamping my library program for next year.

Here's a link to Part II of Hartzell's article on advocacy in SLJ (the link to part one is bad, and it doesn't come up on a search.)

I'm also finding these articles helpful (you'll need access to the Gale databases).

A show of strength: written reports should convey how much your program has to offer. 

Breaking New Ground ,   Sharing Your Expertise,  Making Every Librarian a Leader.
In general, my personal assessment for my own performance this year?  I kind of fell apart. I had some great ideas that either never got off the ground or fizzled under a busy schedule:  tech workshops for parents, weekly faculty workshops, a monthly library newsletter, library displays to promote reading.

While the basic program hummed along, with the usual research units and technology projects, I didn't do much new this year.  When I'm being generous with myself, I view it as a year to consolidate and refine after two years of start-up.  There's definitely some validity to that.  With no library program in place when I arrived, I worked hard for two years not only to develop and build a program, but to develop a library culture within the school.  To give myself credit, that has been very successful.

My more self-critical side, however,  thinks I got lazy.  I was busy, sure, but didn't always make the best use of time. Nor do I think one should let a year go by without trying something new;  I owe it to the students and the faculty to always be striving for better ways of running the library.

So it goes.  All one can do is recognize the problem and take steps to improve.  It's an ongoing process.