Schulbibliotheken/School Libraries

From August 15 -20, a group of eight American and Canadian School Librarians took part in a study tour to Germany.

On Friday, August 19, the group visited the School Library Working Place of the City Library of Frankfurt. Stacy B. Rosenthal of the Council Rock High School South in Holland, Pennsylvania shares her impressions:

Our visit with Mrs. Helga Hofmann, Deputy Head of Department of the School Library Job, a former Goethe “librarian in residence” was really insightful. She spent 4 weeks in October / November 2010 in libraries in Tallahassee and Orlando, Florida (as well as a few vacation days in Miami).

She began our discussion by asking us what differences we had noticed during our visit. Some of the points that we brought up include wooden shelving in North America versus metal shelving in Frankfurt and the fact that public and school libraries are separate entities in North America, but the public library is part of the school library in Frankfurt. Through this collaboration, school libraries inherit cataloguing and processing from the public library program, which also provides volunteer assistants and orders all of the materials for the libraries requested by the librarians including access to eLearning and the databases. Most of the volunteers are parents.

Next, we discussed various programs that the Stadtbücherei (city library), which is made up of 8-10 staff members devoted to school libraries (although not all of them are full time) has. One such program involves the students being trained on how to choose a good book for their school library, then being given 10 Euros each to pick a book from the store for their school library. A bookplate is placed in the front of the newly purchased book recognizing that it was chosen by a student. While 90-95% of the books are curriculum-related, the students choose 5-10% of the collection.

Another program that we talked about was the picture book cinema. This program helps students with their creativity by projecting the images of pictures books onto a screen without words, and then having the students make up their own stories. We also discussed mixed media boxes, which each contain materials for a curriculum unit and can be borrowed for up to 6 weeks.

One idea that I am going to try to adapt in my library is the Make-A-Wish program. In this program, the students are actively included in building the collection of their school library. I want to give my students a chance to make recommendations, but I feel that I can use the name of the program to teach them about the importance of helping in their community by encouraging them to make a donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

One interesting point that we discussed is that if a teacher starts managing the library, s/he can come to the sba for an 8-week training program course on library basics that covers collection development, weeding, software, databases, activities, and public relations. A librarian must be trained at a university, but an assistant librarian can be trained in a library. It is a 3-year program to be a librarian.

We also learned some general background information about the sba. The school library division of the Frankfurt Public Library was established in 1974. Initially, school library services were a joint venture between the Supervisory School Authority and Frankfurt Public Library. Now, the responsibility has been entirely transferred to the Public Library; however, they continue to work closely with the School Authority. Their goals are to work with the standards, secure the basic know-how of running a school library, create structures that ensure sustainability, and reduce the workload of school libraries. They provide a selection of 1,800 titles relevant to school libraries every six months for elementary school, middle school, high school that include both print and non-print materials and some items on special topics.

In conclusion, we learned that Germany has many different approaches and initiatives to establishing school libraries.

From August 15 -20, a group of eight American and Canadian School Librarians took part in a study tour to Germany.

On Friday, August 19, the group visited the School Library Working Place of the City Library of Frankfurt. Stacy B. Rosenthal of the Council Rock High School South in Holland, Pennsylvania shares her impressions:


Our visit to the central library (Zentralbibliothek) provided an interesting comparison to our county library systems. The city library (Stadtbücherei), which houses approximately 7,000 items in 13 branch libraries plus 2 mobile busses, sees about 7,000 visitors per day, mostly in public institutions. In total, they have about 166,000 patrons from the entire Rhine area.

The central library branch that we visited, which opened in 2007, has three floors. There are maps / floor plans throughout the building, which help visitors get around. The first floor houses entertainment materials (fiction books organized in alphabetical order, not by genres, newspapers, magazines, DVDs, and audiobooks. Another floor houses non-fiction materials in book, CD, and DVD format. All of these types of media are shelved together.

The bottom floor houses the music library and is one of the largest of its kind in Germany. Also, since the library used to be a bank, the bottom floor still has the door to the safe of the old bank. That was really neat!! The area that used to house the safe is now a “safeland” with computers that have access to the internet, Microsoft Office, a database of German companies, and the capability for users to work with multimedia such as listening to CDs. The music floor also houses a silent piano so visitors can practice without disturbing the rest of the patrons. There is a grand piano that is used to creatively display music books.

Aside from the safeland, the library has over 50 computers for patrons to use. They can access the internet in 2-hour increments. The library also has 7 printing and photocopy machines. Patrons may make copies for 10ct each.

The library also has many special events, with a priority on multi-cultural activities. They offer resources in five languages other than German including English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Prior to our visit, VHS always meant Video Home System (videocassette) to me. Now it means Volkshochschule, or adult education, which is an additional program offered through the library. The final point of interest to me at the central library was that some librarians only work on the main floor while some also work in the music library, which has 3 librarians.

School Librarian Tour 2011: School Library Working Place of the City Library of Frankfurt, part 1
From August 15 -20, a group of eight American and Canadian School Librarians took part in a study tour to Germany.

On Friday, August 19, the group visited the School Library Working Place of the City Library of Frankfurt. Stacy B. Rosenthal of the Council Rock High School South in Holland, Pennsylvania shares her impressions:

Claudia Neitzel was also thrilled to have us visit her library at the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium . This school library, which serves just over 800 students that feed almost entirely from two composite schools (the Leibniz school and the Helene-Lange School), has over 6,000 titles, mostly non-fiction books, and 20 computers that can be used for internet access, research, and OPAC. This school has a very small fiction section because fiction is offered in the public library, which is right next door. Although students can visit the public library and check out materials, public library patrons can come to the school, but may not borrow materials.

Similar to Mrs. Marschhäuser at the Carl-von-Weinberg school, Mrs. Neitzel chooses books to order from annotated lists with reviews sometimes written by libraries. She also chooses books based off recommendations from students and teachers. Like my school library and the library at the Carl-von-Weinberg School, the school also provides access to information through databases and CD-ROMs. The databases are actually offered through the public library in Frankfurt, so every school has the same throughout the city.

The students, aged 16 and older, that attend the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium come prepared for a heavy workload, as they attend one of the composite schools from grades 5-9, then migrate to FDG for their remaining three years upon achieving suitable success there with real intentions of taking the German examinations. About 100 students that applied to FDG did not get accepted for the current school year. Students may choose to discontinue their education after 9th or 10th grade. While this school offers the same subjects as other secondary schools, arts, biology (but not chemistry), and sports are also offered. All students must take math and German. They can drop one natural science and they have a choice for history between geography and world history. The students have ten classes per day for about 45 minutes each. Some periods double and last for 90 minutes.

Several points that Mrs. Neitzel spoke about were interesting to me. First, she is evaluated informally by the school, but formally by the head of the public library. I have found throughout my career, and most of my colleagues in America agree, that when school administrators evaluate us, they do not know much about school libraries and what we do, so it would be nice to have someone evaluate us that is familiar with libraries. On the other hand, I am not sure if an external evaluator would fully understand the personality of each school that he or she needs to visit for evaluations.

Second, I found it interesting that there are no fines for overdue books for students at school, but there are fines for overdue books in the public library. Most secondary schools in America charge overdue fines.

Next, Mrs. Neitzel had a few interesting programs. She usually hosted an author visit at her school, something that we have done in the past at all levels and plan on doing again in the future. To promote literature, she had an activity titled “What’s Your Favorite Book?” in which she asked teachers to tell her their favorite book, then made a game using the teachers’ pictures and pictures of book covers. We have done a similar activity, mostly in the form of PR (public relations) around the school to promote reading and a display in the library, but I like the idea of an interactive activity. Activities such as these were collected into a cookbook by the public library. This binder, entitled sba-Curriculum (Schulbibliothekarische Arbeitsstelle included best practices for school librarians to use with their students in grades 1-10.

One activity that Mrs. Neitzel did with her students that many of us on the study tour really liked was her library orientation. At FDB, the students come to the library for a 90-minute orientation with a tutor. (Most of the tutors are also school teachers.) She puts the students into groups, which have 45 minutes to answer one of the following questions:
1. What do we have here? / What’s here?
2. How does borrowing / lending work?
3. How do I find something on a shelf? (How are the books arranged? What do the call numbers on the spine labels look like?)
4. When should I do research in the databases versus surf the internet to find information? (Databases vs. Google)
5. Search, Find, and Cite/Quote
(Using the table of contents and appendix, and how to do in-text citations)
6. Who is writing the information? Are they substantial/credible? What authority do they have on the topic? Is the writing authenticity?

7. Online and eLearning (electronic) – this leads the students to find sources outside of the library

After researching the answers to the above, the students then present their findings to their peers and Mrs. Neitzel fills in the pieces that they miss. We liked this type of orientation because the lesson required active participation and very little lecture by the librarian. I am going to attempt to translate Mrs. Neitzel’s activity from German to English for my colleagues in America and Canada so that we can adapt it for our libraries. This lesson has been a popular topic amongst those of us on the study tour since our visit!!!!