Blog Post 4– VPL/VSB Library Partnership: Understanding your User

 In the last discussion on reference materials, Diana Liao, brought up the idea of the public library partnership. This is a model that is used at Britannia and unfortunately it does not work. There are a myriad of reasons for the failure: poor location, limited space, and lack of ownership on the students part. However, I think the public library partnership fails on another fundamental level: the needs of the public user and the high school user are completely at odds with each other. As a TL, one's primary goal may be to get students into the library to access resources and to boost reading frequency. If one considers why a public user goes to the library, the answer may be much broader. The public user, may be doing research, looking for a quiet space to relax, finding a good read, or he/she may simply looking for a free, warm, clean space to socialize.

The public library brings a treasury resources to the classroom, but it also brings an army of public users, some of whom have highly specialized needs. And, because a partnership library is a public space, there is no way for a TL to control the environment in a way that meets the needs of the student users.

I use the Britannia Library on two levels: as a teacher and as a member of the community. On almost every visit to the library, something wacky happens. I have seen public users with mental challenges lose it in the library. I've seen the librarian get verbally abused by unstable users. There are often groups of non-Brit students hanging around the library smoking. I've had users tell me my students shouldn't be in the library. The needs of the public are not the same as the needs of the high-school.

When the library partnership was created in the 1970's I think that there must have been a lot of excitement about the possibility for greater resource access and lower cost. I do not think anyone sat down and talked about the development of a young person and their need to feel ownership and belonging. Unfortunately, the fallout of this experiment is that Britannia has no library and no heart centre.