High Impact School Library Spaces

Book excerpt: To keep school libraries relevant, their physical spaces need to be reinvented to mirror 21st-century learning models. This book will enable everyone from school librarians and principals to district-level administrators, architects, and interior planners of school library spaces to reconceptualize school libraries. School libraries provide invaluable benefits and services, but many of today's school administrators, parents, and students no longer see their value. Now most students have their own computing devices and the use of eBooks is on the rise; students can gather information anywhere, at any time. This book offers bold new ways to think about library spaces and suggests how libraries can provide the spaces needed to encourage students to explore learning. It also presents librarians with dynamic ideas and plans that can be used as a springboard for planning with school administrators, architects, and builders. The book identifies opportunities for creating spaces that support instructional models such as guided inquiry, examines technology skills needed after graduation, shows digital media hubs complementing maker spaces, and discusses how incorporating social media spaces into library design can encourage learning. The author guides librarians through the process of documenting the district learning goals in order to translate those specific goals into library space plans for an architect or interior designer. Readers will discover templates for flexible, up-to-date library designs that serve to not only improve students' learning and critical thinking skills but also to emphasize the modern school librarian's role in boosting academic achievement.