Interest Inventories

After a nice summer vacation, I’m back in the saddle as an elementary school librarian in Central New York. It’s been a crazy week thanks to Mandarin 3, but circulation is up and finally running.

I’ve found in my two years teaching as a librarian that motivating students to read and learn throughout the year is critical. One strategy that I’ve found to be enormously effective is to administer to all students, in the first week, an interest inventory. The inventory is a critical piece of information to the librarian over the course of the school year. First, it informs the librarians decision making process when purchasing literature. A smaller, more targeted collection does better. Second, knowing what your users want, at any level (elementary clients included), is critical to circulation and school/patron-wide reading.

I’ve found that getting a baseline of your patrons’ interests can inform purchasing for the entire school year. It also comes in quite handy when a 3rd grader is giving you a great deal of grief about your ‘boring’ collection. When disinterest spells a dislike for reading, I’m able to query the vertical file and remind them of their interests and point them to books on topics that they’ve specifically requested.

Over the course of three years I’ve boiled my inventories down to ten essential questions. I highly recommend administering an interest inventory at the commencement of each school year. You’ll see a spike in circulation and more students motivated to read books from your collection. Promise.