School Librarian

The Library & Information Gazette (29 June - 12 July) features a local librarian Marion Milroy, on its regular People page. Marion works in a secondary school library in Sheffield and the article features the tribulations and achievements that are typical of this sector.

She describes the "long hard slog" in getting the library habit established with pupils and in getting the service back in the minds of staff. She has a "paltry" budget for stock but subscribes to the Schools Library Service so she can borrow up to a thousand books per year.

She involves herself in school life as much as possible, running after school clubs for English and Warhammer (but does she have a battalion of Space Marine Librarians?) She also does things as diverse as overseeing School Council Meetings and selling tickets for the Battle of the Bands competition. She also took part in the school's expedition to Malealea in Lesotho, South Africa where she helped in the High School library. On top of this she suffered a flood in her own library, not as a result of the recent bad weather but because someone stole the copper piping from the water tank above her office!

SINTO is expanding its services to school librarians. We have a special page on the wiki and we are running an event on promoting reading later this year. Marion mentions the problems of being a lone worker and hopefully SINTO can help overcome this.