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The American Embassy School libraries support the AES Mission for the students, faculty, staff and parents of the AES community. The libraries encourage “inspired lifelong learning” and support all areas of the AES curriculum. Literacy, literature appreciation, inquiry, and collaboration are key components of the library programs. Both libraries’ welcoming environments provide access to current, relevant resources. |
Building a library collection is about quality more than quantity. Our book collection had gotten so large in recent years that it was overflowing the shelves, and a lot of the information was out of date or of no interest to our library community. One of our major undertakings this year was to update the collection primarily by "weeding" (yes, that's the official library term!) dated materials.
A library for a school like ours should have around 25 books per student, and the average age of the collection should be about 10 years. At the beginning of the year we had 45 books per student with an average age of 18 years. After the first round of weeding the non-fiction section, the number of books per student 36 and the average age is 16 years. The nonfiction collection was the focus of most of the weeding, and its average age improved by 5 years.
It will take more thoughtful weeding and ordering to get the average age where we want it to be but already we have more room to display books, and our circulation has gone up by 35 percent from a year ago!
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| This is how many of the shelves looked before weeding. | This is how we'd like all of the shelves to look. |
MS and HS students in all grade levels came to the library to conduct research in humanities, science, health, history, math, art, and English. A major focus of library lessons is how to conduct academically honest research. Students at all grade levels use Noodletools (which had over 15,000 AES logins this year) to help them cite their sources, and they're all encouraged to use a notetaking method that requires them to paraphrase as they go.
"I didn't realise how much the notecards would help during the writing process, but after I started using them properly, I was essentially able to write the essay with ease." - Grade 10 student
"I think one of the great things about the research process was the vast number of topics we were exposed to and allowed to choose from, which enabled me to pick a topic which I thought was unique and genuinely interested in. Once again, the librarian was always there to help and provided me with books, databases, and other resourcs pertinent to the topic I was researching." - Grade 10 student
You are doing a great job. I really appreciate the openness and the energy around research etc. You and your team are always so helpful. The school is lucky to have this library as a resource!!
Everything has been great and I hope to utilize the Library more in the future, especially when it comes to classes doing specialized research.
I appreciated the changes done to the library program this year. Linda was very pro-active in searching out teachers to ask how she could help them. I appreciated small touches like the bulletin board outside the library. Making the space in side the library more welcoming and making better use of the space was also a great idea.
Middle School
High School
The Libguides platform (where you're reading this report) is the library's home for digital content and resources. The guides have been viewed over 19,900 times this year. The most-used guides were:
The AES libraries provide access to several databases to help students with their inquiry projects. Each year we analyze usage data to determine which databases we should keep, add, or discontinue. According to survey data, the MS students' favorite databases are Newsela, Britannica, Brainpop, and Opposing Viewpoints. The HS students' (grades 9 to 11) favorite databases: Britannica, EBSCO, Facts on File history databases, Questia, and JSTOR.
Based on usage data on the number of searches conducted, Britannica, JSTOR and Questia are the most-used databases.
The library is probably the most comfy place in the school. It's the best place to study, hang out (quietly), and just spend quality time with both books and people. It's hard to pinpoint an exact point when the library helped me, though. If I had to choose, it'd probably be when I ordered books about Artificial Intelligence through the library to see if I really wanted to go into that field.
In our school, I think the school library really functions like a hub. For the four years going to AES, every morning I will meet my friends in the library and socialize before going to the first period. During breaks, during lunch, or even after school, the place I would go with my friends was the library to either rush to study, work on a project, or even just to spend time. This was because it is the only place that is large enough to have enough privacy among ourselves. Additional to that, during exams or in between summatives, the first place I would go to the library. For me it was really an environment that allowed me to be focused when focused and also relax when I needed to relax.
The library really helped me figure out what I was supposed to do for my extended essay because of the examples it keeps also it was my main go to place for research information for the majority of my IAs.
Library for me has been a huge resource for my extracurricular studies. I could find virtually every resource that I was interested in.
One of our ongoing goals in the library is to improve how books are organized in order to help the students find them more easily. We're trying to "think like a bookstore" by adjusting how books are grouped and adding signage to encourage our patrons to browse and help them find what they're looking for.
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| Section signs | Shelf labels |
Databases (contract services) and books are the biggest expenditures for the library.
Library Staff Professional Development sessions were organized during the year on some of the early release days for the ES and MS/HS Library Staff. The sessions encompassed a range of topics, broadly including Library Technology, Google Apps training, and latest trends in Education Technology. Such opportunities create an environment of learning and growth which allows everyone to use their knowledge in their day to day work to become better at collaboration and be more productive.
