AASL Standards Shared Foundation: Curate

School Librarian Domains and Alignments:

A. School librarians challenge learners to act on an information need.

B. School librarians promote information gathering appropriate to the task.

C. School librarians contribute to and guide information resource exchange within and beyond the school learning community.

D. School librarians show learners how to select and organize information for a variety of audiences.

Emily Curry is the media specialist for Liberty Middle School. She is a recent graduate of the iSchool and is in her second year as librarian. I have the privilege of working closely with her every day and have observed how she manages the library program and its collection. These things made Emily an easy choice when it came to selecting librarians to interview. Curation is and has always been central to the profession so that is where we chose to focus this interview.

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Mrs. Curry was able to name a multitude of ways that the curate competencies are used in a school library, but particularly in her library. These include everything from the way you plan your collection, order books, how you choose what to weed, and accessibility of the materials for students. It means making sure your students have access to digital and print resources and technology, but also that you are teaching them how to use these resources effectively and appropriately. It requires you to teach students how to find their own resources and how to evaluate their relevance and accuracy. What materials will best suit your needs and is there bias reflected in the material?

I have also witnessed Emily using the curate foundation when collaborating with teachers in our library. When teachers are working on certain projects and units, Emily teaches them how to research using Discus, but also from our own school library catalog. Sometimes she also pulls select titles to have out and ready for lessons on the specific topics they are working with in class. Our Spanish teacher, every year for National Hispanic Heritage Month, collaborates with Mrs. Curry. She will pull materials on the countries and cultures. Sometimes she pulls together videos that work with the lesson also. She also sets up displays throughout the year which is a curation of topic based material. What better person to help gather resources than the local information specialist in the building.

Some things she finds that makes this foundation challenging, is the students always wanting to go straight to Google for all their answers. It provides them with an instant answer, and combating the instant gratification in favor of accurate sources of information is consistently a challenge. Google is an easy one-stop shop, and finding and evaluating appropriate resources requires more reading and discernment. Teaching students that Google is often biased and littered with sponsored posts that will not always give you trustworthy information is important and this frustration seems to be across the board with the school librarians in middle and elementary school that I have observed. Helping these students to gain good information literacy skills in their research is ever more important in today's age with constant barrage of information that isn't verified and with AI at the forefront.

The curate foundation is all about managing and building a collection of resources for students and teaching them how to collect and use information for themselves.