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September 24, 2009 by Travis Jonker

School Librarian Tip: Don’t Spend it all in One Place

September 24, 2009 by Travis Jonker   9 comments

Saturday I made a run to the bookstore to pick some things up for the schools where I work. Here’s the result:

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We’ve got some new 39 Clues, The Magician’s Elephant, new Beyond Spiderwick, and others.

It never fails – the school year starts, student requests start rolling in, and you realize you don’t have the latest in-demand title, or the recent update to a beloved series. If you’re like me, you hate it when this happens (the “not having the book kids want” part, not the “student request” part).

It took me a bit to figure out that I should do something that would enable me to pick these titles up during the course of the year. I couldn’t just spend my entire budget on one massive book order, or I would be left penniless and embarrassed in the face of desperate appeals for the new Ranger’s Apprentice.

If you have the ability, I recommend dedicating a portion of your ‘flow to be spent at a local bookstore, so that you can buy requested books as they pop up. I do not, however, recommend using the term “flow” in reference to your library budget. It’s unprofessional, folks.

No matter how diligent I am with book orders, titles always fall through the cracks. This helps fill in the gaps.

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About Travis Jonker

Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter: @100scopenotes.

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Comments

  1. Rebecca Wojahn says

    September 24, 2009 at 7:04 am

    I do the same thing. I like it, too, because there’s no wait for the order (or, heaven forbid, the backorder) for these popular books to arrive.

    Even more fun is taking a group of kids to the bookstore to help pick these books out!

    Beck

  2. Jana says

    September 24, 2009 at 10:35 am

    I just placed my first order of the year and was discussing a certain title with a fellow librarian and she said she wasn’t going to order it because she’d be ordering it more for herself than the students. I thought, “oh shoot, that’s right, these are for the students not me!”

  3. Scope Notes says

    September 24, 2009 at 11:37 am

    Ha – yeah I have to stop myself sometimes too. It usually happens when I’m tempted to purchase a book that is for an older audience than the school I’m ordering for.

  4. Jennifer says

    September 24, 2009 at 3:25 pm

    I only order once a month – and I admit to having told kids to get what they want from another library in our consortium. As I tell them – I can’t spend my whole budget on vampire books and star wars! It drives me crazy to have incomplete series, but we can’t fill them all in and it’s nuts trying to divine which ones are going to be popular.

  5. The Brain Lair says

    September 24, 2009 at 7:55 pm

    I am lucky that I have some “flow” money. Never enough though! Speaking of that new Ranger’s Apprentice…BRB!

  6. Abby says

    September 25, 2009 at 12:05 am

    Oooh, ordering books?? What’s that like? *grumblegrumblebudgetcutsgrumble*

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