ETL507 - Assignment 5: Professional Placement Report (Section 1 - About the Organisation)

This post is part of one of final assignments broken posted and broken down into their respective sections. I have decided to post this assignment as I feel that it is important to document what I undertook during my Professional Placement. This is verbatim for what I submitted for this assignment.

​My host organisation was the Aberfoyle Park Primary School Campus Library (The Campus Library). The Campus Library services three primary schools who share the one campus and some facilities. Thiele Primary School[1] is attached to the South Australian Department for Education, whereas The School of Nativity is attached to the South Australian Commission for Catholic Education, and Pilgrim School is an Independent school attached to the Uniting Church. All three schools are co-educational. The Campus Library has an important role in ensuring that all three schools (staff, students and wider community) needs are met with the resources that they require to competently run their classes. There is also an onsite preschool (Aberfoyle Park Campus Preschool) however, they appear to have minimal input into the running or organisation of the Campus Library. Thus, the bulk of this report will refer to the primary schools (“three schools” or similar).
 
The Campus Library has a parent collection that is available to parents to loan out under their own account (not attached to their child's). This parent collection is primarily made up of Christian orientated texts as they originally came from Pilgrim School. They have an attached classroom that can be used as a MakerSpace as well as a computer lab with laptops available for class bookings. The senior fiction is kept in a separate area that allows for the Year 5-7 students to gradually become more independent. The general fiction collection is sorted by genre (adventure, mystery, sport etc) and is available to all year levels. The graphic novel section is a smaller one and is also available to all year levels (with select items housed in the senior fiction). The non-fiction collection is organised in Dewey Decimal Classification and is available to all students.  The picture fiction is also available to all students but is mainly aimed at the early childhood and junior primary age groups. There are quick reads available within both the general and senior fiction. Two smaller collections - Christmas and Easter - are also available to all students and are bought out when it is the appropriate time of the year. All texts - fiction and non-fiction - are labelled with their Lexile number and Premiers Reading Challenge label where appropriate.
 
The Campus Library has to balance the requirements of two religious schools with strong core values and a government school that is more liberal with their values. The School of Nativity and Pilgrim School do not want LGBTQI+ related texts featured in the Campus Library, however, it is a department regulation that all persons are represented in the collection, including LGBTIQ+. How the Campus Library mitigates this is by marking the texts with a orange dot on the spine of the book and notifying all schools about what the texts are and leaving it up to the individual schools as to whether they wish to advertise the texts or steer students away from them (Molloy, 2019). When special event displays are being planned (i.e Asia Week, Book Week etc), events promoting LGBTIQ+ are avoided due to the ethos of two of the three schools on Campus.
 
If The Campus Library ceased to exist, the collection would more than likely be divided between the three schools and they would then be responsible for the funding of their own Libraries, rather than jointly funding the existing one.
 
References
​Molloy, Hajnalka. (2019). Campus Library Collection and Selection Policy: Draft 1. Adelaide: Aberfoyle Park Primary School Campus.


[1] Due to Hajnalka Molloy’s employment, I was primarily associated with Thiele Primary School for logistical reasons.