Librarians Meet at Victorious Kidss Educares

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”― Neil Gaiman

The ‘Liferarian’ is a collaborative group started 3 years ago by like-minded librarians from IB accredited schools. The aim of this group is to collaborate, showcase, learn and support each other. The group actively collaborates through various platforms on social media and meets once every year. The 4^th Liferarian meet was organized at Victorious Kidss Educares on 16 Nov. 2019. The meet witnessed participation of about 27 library professionals from 17 IB schools from Mumbai, Pune, Kohapur and Aurangabad which was much more than expected.  All the visitors were very impressed and mesmerized by the school atmosphere. There was a common echo that the school atmosphere has vibrant and positive vibe, you can actually feel it. All were impressed by the facilities like the large library space, the conference room, dining hall and most importantly the natural light in the school which many of the schools are deprived of due to space constraints. All the participants appreciated and thanked the school for providing the space for the meet, all the facilities including ICT and WiFi and more over the delicious lunch.

The meet was well planned and organized with sessions on ‘The Role of IB Librarian’, ATL and Curriculum, Tech-integration in library, Academic Integrity, and Library Space Management. PYP Head Ms. Ira Ghosh addressed the meet with words of motivation and also felicitated the mentors of the Liferarian group.

The session on ‘Role of Librarian’ had all the participants engaged in pitching up their best practices and challenges in the areas mainly focusing on ATL, projects, Curriculum and collection development followed by discussion on strategies to overcome these challenges. The ATL and Curriculum session augmented with fun activities that set the tune of developing ATL skills through variety of activities. The Bus Stop activity helped to bring common understanding of strands in each ATL cluster across all IB programmes. The facilitators created drive for all librarians to share bank of activities for developing ATL skills.

The Tech-Integration session stressed the need for library professionals to keep pace with time and to adapt and integrate technology in their information literacy lessons. The facilitator and the participants shared and discussed many social media tools and web 2.0 tools to integrate technology into developing ATL skills. The session left participants to introspect how library professional could revive their library to Media resource centre. Academic integrity session focused on the highlights in the new IB publication –Academic integrity. The session sparked discussion on various instances of academic misconduct and ways to curb them. The session led to clearer insights on expectations of IB in terms of academic integrity and roles of teaching and learning community.

The highlight of the meet was the enthusiastic participation and collaboration by all -both new and experienced library professionals. The participants were happy they invested their time into fruitful and enriched learning which they could apply in their upcoming professional endeveours. They also appreciated the meticulous planning and organization by the VKE library department for the successful event. Overall the Liferarian meet was a day full of insightful and informative sessions leaving all the participants yearning for more.