|
EDTECH
Using Libib for Managing a Small, Distributed School Library
by Colleen Sheils
| As the school’s first librarian in its 10-year history—and a part-timer—I inherited a situation that needed a creative technical approach. |
Libib is an app designed for personal library management that I’ve had success in using for a school library collection of more than 17,000 books. Users can log multiple collections of books, movies, music, or video games in Libib. While Libib’s basic subscription is free to use for up to 5,000 items, its affordable, Pro-level subscription allows up to 100,000 items and has a much more expansive functionality, which makes it a rather flexible and effective collection management system for an institutional library on a smaller scale—or so has been my experience. Libib has proven to be a solid library management system (LMS) for the robust collection at my school library—a library with its own unique set of challenges and opportunities.
The Library and Collection
Let me explain my school’s situation before discussing how Libib has proven to be a helpful solution for our unique circumstances. I work at a pre-K–8 international school in central Tokyo, a private English-language community school (with approximately 225 students) that prides itself on offering a reasonable tuition compared to most international schools. Set in two office buildings, the school has never had a central library due to space limitations. Instead, the collection is divided up around the campus (classrooms, hallways, and common areas). While this presents several challenges in regard to collection development—especially with organization and evaluation—I try to see my involvement in this unusual library as an opportunity for reimagining the library space and collection organization. We are working with what we have, so we might as well stay positive and discover some creative solutions.
In 2022, my initial task as the school’s first librarian was to migrate the existing collection to a new LMS. Up to that point, teachers had been using a classroom library app with separate login information for each grade. The app, while easy enough to use, was limiting the ability of users to see what was in the rest of the school outside of their specific grade collection. Essentially, the school had eight different subscriptions and logins, as each grade had its own LMS. There was no interoperability between grades, so teachers had no idea what books or items anyone else had in their collection. On top of these limitations, the LMS could only be used in-house by managers, so students had no access to the LMS since there was no OPAC. It was not an ideal solution, but it was only $36 annually for each subscription. However, the school had clearly outgrown it. It was basically a case of someone at some point having chosen this system with good intentions, but then the school stuck with it for longer than it should have simply because no one was around to point out how do to it differently. The time had come for a change.
Looking for a Low-Budget, High-Functioning LMS
While the school has invested a fair amount of money in books over its 10 years—amassing a collection of nearly 20,000 books before I came on—a budget was never put aside for an LMS, perhaps because its importance wasn’t quite understood. I knew it was unlikely that the leadership team would agree to invest in one of the typical, high-end proprietary LMSs found at schools, such as Accessit. While these systems automate a lot of the collection-oriented steps of school librarianship—freeing up time and space for a librarian to teach more classes and focus on more user-oriented tasks—they were all out of our price range. At this point, the school had just barely decided to invest in me as a librarian, so I didn’t want to push it or blow the whole library budget by investing in an expensive LMS right off the bat. While open source systems such as Koha are an option, the need for back-end tech support means you have to have an IT specialist on staff or pay to outsource this job. Neither were options in my case.
As the school’s first librarian in its 10-year history—and a part-timer—I inherited a situation that needed a creative technical approach to allow a large, dispersed collection to be housed in one digital warehouse. The LMS had to be able to keep each grade separate but also offer an aggregated search function to see everything in the entire school. In addition, the needs of the users and the management staffers had to be met. Aside from a few grades that I do checkouts for directly, in most cases, teachers are checking out books to students because the collection is so spread out. So the interface of the new LMS had to be something teachers could use easily. It also needed to be straightforward enough for me and my team of parent volunteers—many of whom are non-native English speakers—to competently handle the back-end aspects. Finally, I also had to find an LMS that was somewhat self-sustainable and something the teachers could continue to operate on their own, as there was no guarantee there would be an ongoing position for me or another librarian in the years to come. Bringing me on has been a sort of trial for the school, and I have remained aware that whatever systems I set up have to be able to keep going without me there.
While my LMS search led me to explore a number of options, I settled on Libib despite it being lesser-known. It would cost us only $15 a month and let us house the whole school collection in one database, while also allowing us to separate the collections for each grade. Additionally, it has an OPAC page for students and families to search the library collection. The price was unbeatable too—only $9 per month for the basic Pro subscription with the education discount that Libib offers. With an extra $2 for each new manager added, we are paying a very doable $15 a month in the end. At $180 a year, it ended up being cheaper than the $288 that we were paying for the previous system.
Why Libib Has Worked
Although a deceivingly simple app, Libib actually offers a number of sophisticated functions that suited my purpose along with the school’s price point. It lets the library manager create up to 100 collections, which I used to designate the various locations around my school where the books are kept. In my case, each grade has its own collection, and we have a separate nonfiction collection and a Japanese-language one. Students or teachers can search locally in their collection or quickly toggle to search everything in the school.
When new books are added by ISBN, Libib produces some basic metadata via copy cataloging. For books, you usually get a picture of the cover, the title, author name, year of publication, number of pages, and then call numbers for DDC, LCCN, and OCLC, as well as ISBN numbers. Sometimes, you only get some of that info, and then you have to edit to fix any missing information you need. The system also indicates the date an item was added, the number of copies, and its status of being checked out or not. Occasionally, you’ll also get a brief description of the book. This basic metadata that Libib provides is decent but has inconsistencies from item to item. As best we can, my team uses the editing function to rectify this.
The best part of Libib—and one reason it works so well for our scrappy, unusual library—is that it allows us to create our own unique descriptive metadata. Libib offers a couple of ways to do this. We can create tags that are searchable. We use the tag function to give any pertinent information needed to help a book be located, such as indicate the guided reading level of the book (a requirement that is part of the school’s literacy curriculum and how books are organized in the elementary school—despite my own thoughts on this) or what category or genre it is (we use categories in our nonfiction collection and genres in our middle-grade fiction in lieu of Dewey decimal or call numbers).
Another way to insert metadata in Libib is by adding new, customized fields. You can add up to four. This information will not be searchable, but it will appear with the rest of the basic descriptive metadata. For administrative metadata, there is a Notes field in which those of us who are managing the library can add comments that won’t be easily seen in the search results but that we can find if needed. All of this customization helps tremendously with my organizational efforts, since our physical space is so unusual. While Libib offers exportable data, I am not sure how easily other systems will read this metadata after it’s been customized so much. I have yet to test this out, since Libib is working well for us, and we don’t plan to change our LMS anytime soon. It is important to point out that adding an item is not a simple scan-and-shelve process; I spend a lot of time on the back end to customize the LMS. If you enjoy this kind of stuff, as I do, Libib provides a number of ways to make the system yours.
Additionally, Libib offers the option of barcodes for scanning, but we have not put this into place at my school simply due to time and resource constraints. Scanners can be purchased and linked to the system. There is a mobile scanning app, so scanning and self-checkout can be done on a phone. If older devices are sitting unused around your school, this may be a good way to give them a second life.
For evaluation purposes, Libib gives a lot of useful data in the Dashboards and Report sections. This can help a librarian understand their collection better and see what is circulating or not. The Dashboard gives basic stats on the numbers of items (unique and total) in each collection, lending stats by the year, and patron stats by the month. The Report page shows how many times an individual item has been checked out, which items have not been checked out at all, which items have had holds made on them, etc. Both of these pages are helpful for collection development.
The Migration
Migrating a collection to a new management system is a big undertaking that feels like a dive into the unknown. As a new librarian, it was a little scary, in all honestly. But at the same time, I knew something had to change and what would be waiting on the other side was a better library experience for our school community. However, I also knew it was going to require a lot of work on the back end, since we did not have exportable data from the former system—and our collection wasn’t small. The migration would be up to me and my amazing team of 10 parent volunteers and would have to be a slow and methodical process.
We started by migrating one grade’s collection first, then running a beta test with those teachers to get feedback. Once we received positive feedback, my volunteer team continued to log all of the rest of the books in our pre-K–8 school, which was a task that took until the end of the school year to complete. During this slow process, I was evaluating the collection and weeding as much as possible, since deselection had not happened in 10 years. I was able to get in a decent round of weeding and slim down the collection by a few thousand books.
The ongoing review that was happening with the beta testers led to some metadata adjustments to improve the experience for teachers. We launched the new LMS for the whole school at the start of the 2023–2024 school year. We have been using it schoolwide for almost 6 months, as of this writing. While it has been a successful launch, I am undergoing another review and evaluation this term to get more feedback and make further improvements. It is an ongoing process, but the feedback from teachers and staffers has been very positive.
Summing Up
In a budget-driven move away from expensive proprietary school LMSs, I set out to find a LMS that would work for my school’s unique circumstance. While Libib isn’t even meant for school libraries, it has suited my school’s needs exceptionally well. For smaller institutions that find themselves with similar budget constraints but desire a flexible and functionable collection management system, it could be an equally helpful solution.
|
