Library Partnerships: Making Connections between School and Public Libraries

Citation

McNicol, S. (2010), "Library Partnerships: Making Connections between School and Public Libraries", New Library World, Vol. 111 No. 3/4, pp. 168-169. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801011027682

Collaboration between libraries from different sectors is a topic, which has assumed increasing importance in recent years. Co‐operation between school and public libraries serving children and young people is an obvious, and fundamental, partnership and one, which can bring significant benefits for both parties. I, therefore, had high hopes for this book, which is intended to “help librarians appreciate, communicate, and build on the benefits of school/public library relationships in order to make the most of tight budgets, create rich environments, and promote the development of lifelong learners”.

The first section of the book deals with the basics of establishing and continuing a partnership, such as setting realistic expectations, arranging a meeting and exploring different ideas for collaborative projects. The author follows this by describing a number of common collaborative ventures in greater detail; these include summer reading programmes and homework clubs. She then develops the theme to consider more ambitious projects: partnerships encompassing a whole district or state, or programmes, which operate at a national level.

The ways in which technology can be used to facilitate partnerships is perhaps one of the most useful chapters as this is a topic, which many librarians are currently exploring, or will need to consider in the future. Squires describes the uses of email discussion, lists, online, communities, blogs, wikis, instant messaging, myspace and other tools, which can assist in partnering with other libraries.

Of course, resource sharing has come to mean more than simply loans of book stock, so online resource sharing also features. Interesting, the final collaborative venture to be described is, perhaps, the most traditional, school visits by public librarians and class visits to public libraries. The book concludes with two chapters looking at wider issues: how to garner support for collaboration and how to maintain partnerships through staff changes and other challenges.

Library Partnerships is written by an experienced young adult librarian and is focused on offering practical advice for practitioners. It does provide extremely detailed advice about how to establish basic partnerships, so would be useful for those new to the profession, or indeed information studies students, but of limited value to those with more experience. The focus is very much on the prosaic; there were few truly inspirational ideas such as those which can be found on The Reading Agency's web site (www.readingagency.org.uk/young/young%20people‐upload/ERideaschecklist.pdf), and elsewhere. A further difficulty is that the book is written for the US market, so its direct application elsewhere is more limited. For example, in the UK School Library Services play an important role in school‐public library partnerships. I also felt that the book would have benefited from being authored jointly by a school librarian and a public librarian, or someone with experience of working in both sectors.

Tasha Squires is correct when she says “in library school this topic (school‐public library partnership) rarely comes up during public library classes”. I would therefore recommend this book to students interested in library services for children and young people, but existing librarians from either sector would find the level of information of limited value. I hope it is not long before another book is published which examines this important topic in greater depth and offers the level of advice, which would assist those keen to make more ambitious connections between school and public libraries.