WHS Library Report

2021-2022 High School Library Report

Collection Development

We weeded 1,890 books that were outdated, in bad condition, or no longer necessary. They were donated to More than Words, a non-profit organization in Waltham supporting youth in foster care. Now we have space to add books reflecting a variety of cultures and viewpoints relating to the curriculum and current student and faculty interest.

We added approximately 750 new books, including world language books in Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Arabic and French purchased with a DEI grant. This collection will be introduced to the community this year, along with our new Gender Diversity collection.

We also have space to adjust the way we display books to make it more appealing to students. We expanded graphic novel displays, and plan to do the same for fiction.

Browse the new books here: New Books

Library Resource usage

 

Teaching and collaboration Alida Hanson taught the Digital Literacy Seminar to 9th grade during 2nd quarter. During the last class students took a survey and reported that:

• 83.5% are familiar with the 5 key questions of media literacy
• 86%  feel comfortable evaluating articles and videos to decide if and how to use them
• 98.4%  know how to cite sources when they use them in research projects
• 94% feel comfortable finding and using the library website
• 96% can find books in the library using the Destiny catalog and finding the books on the shelves
• 87%  feel confident they can find SORA to find and read audio and eBooks

Alida Hanson also taught other classes and collaborated with teachers on projects which can be viewed here: Alida Hanson’s 2021-2022 teaching log

Communication

Building on the practices we introduced last year,  we communicated with students, guardians and the school community 1 or 2x per month. Midyear, we developed a workflow that puts all of the announcements on a library blog.: Library blog

Databases and digital subscriptions

• American Indian History
• AP News
• Britannica Encyclopedia
• Culturegrams
• Gale databases
• Gale eBooks
• Infobase eBooks
• Kanopy
• Medieval and Ancient History
• The New York Times
• Noodletools
• Proquest Historical Newspapers
• Scholastic Go!
• SORA ebooks
• Turnitin
• The Wall Street Journal
• World News Digest

New for 2022-2023: Focus on SEL

We are introducing monthly craft activities to the library this year to meet students’ social/emotional needs. We have added plants and a water feature to enhance the environment. We’ll introduce our world language and gender diversity collections. We’re also hosting the therapy dog provided by Paula Gearan during second semester in the collab during lunch!!!!!

For more info about library services please visit the library website.

Library website

Alida Hanson