Budget and Resources
Action Item:
By 2023, the School Library Team will gather and evaluate data to determine the extent to which our new purchase of Overdrive's Sora app, as well as our participation in the WSDLC, is benefitting students. The Certified Library Media Specialist will use this data to determine which percentage of the budget is advantageous to spend on digital materials moving forward.
Summary
The Lakewood School Library Team is committed to ongoing collection development and maintenance in order to meet our mission statement and goals. The funding for the Lakewood School Library primarily comes from the WI state Common School Fund (CSF), but also from book fairs and other fundraising efforts. Please see the Lakewood School Library Collection Development Policy and Collection Data below to learn more about our budget and resources.
Collection Development Policies & Manual
Library Policies within the School Board Policy Manual
Lakewood School Library Collection Data:
The following data is taken from the library inventory completed on June 9, 2020.
Items in Collection: 17,785
Average Age of Collection: 2007
Books per Student: 53.0 (based on an enrollment number of 335 students)
Digital Resources
Prior to the end of the 2019-2020 school year, only 1% of the Lakewood School Library's collection was made up of digital resources. This is reflected in the chart above.
At the end of the 2019-2020 school year, WI school libraries receiving CSF project money were granted an extra sum to be spent on digital resources to support student access to library materials in the months ahead. Per the recommendation of the WI DPI School Library Education Consultant, the Lakewood School Library used this money to join the Wisconsin Schools Digital Library Consortium (WSDLC). The WSDLC provides participating members with access to a collection of thousands of e-books and audiobooks curated by certified K-12 Library Media Specialists from throughout the state. The cost is determined by participating schools' student enrollment, and the materials are made available through the Overdrive app for K-12 Schools called "Sora."
No data about Lakewood student use/satisfaction with Sora/WSDLC is currently available, so our action item is to gather and analyze this data as a means of evaluating its effectiveness and determining next steps for providing students with access to digital resources.
Results:
Since beginning our participation in the Wisconsin Digital Library Consortium in August 2020, exactly 3 years ago as of August 2023, our students and staff have checked out 6,567 materials on Sora.
128 of digital resources (ebooks/audiobooks) were items funded in our district's "advantage account," (titles we purchase with our Common School Funds, only to be used by our students) and 95,572 additional items were made available to students through our participation in the WSDLC, which costs under $2 per student for one year.
In the same 3 years, 16,534 print books were circulated through the Lakewood School Library. This means that nearly 1/3 of our circulations were digital materials (ebooks and audiobooks).
Our introduction of the Sora app, alongside our participation in the WSDLC has been wildly successful for the following reasons:
Students have access to a broader range of titles
Students have access to alternative formats such as ebooks, audiobooks, and read-along books, which support accessibility for students with learning differences
Students are able to check out reading materials more frequently, including weekends, holidays, interims, and summers
When titles are purchased, students are able to access materials almost immediately, and don't have to wait for materials to be shipped, and processed into the library collection