Saturday, August 25, 2012

Where in the world is the library orientation?

Me at Celsus Library, Ephesus, Turkey
So the new staff have had a whole week of orientation. Talks from the Business Office, talks about the IB programmes we run, sessions about culture shock, health insurance and tours of the school.... then they get a one hour (only one hour!) library orientation. How to use Destiny and  how to use the library. As always I try to make maximum impact in the allotted time so I resort to a method we used in New Zealand with new students at the start of each year. Make it into a game. 

Every holidays I ask my colleagues to have their photo taken outside a library. I use these library photos as a resource for an activity. People are given the photo and shelf markers made from the photo and then they have to find out information about the country the library photo was taken. They then locate books about the country on the catalogue and put the shelf markers where the books are on the shelf. The last activity is to label a map of the library. It is simple and fun and from the feedback I got we should have spent longer on the activity. All in all a successful introduction to our library.