I’m a qualified librarian and work for the Schools Library Service in North East Wales Library Service. I did a degree in librarianship and as such became a member of CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
The main brief of the school library service is to provide projects topic requests for schools. We provide books, DVDs, artefacts and things that assist teachers with teaching the curriculum. At the moment we’re at the process of putting projects together for next term. I am also the Welsh language coordinator so take responsibility for sourcing and buying these resources too. We have around 900,000 books at our fingertips!
Most of our secondary schools have librarians in post and full or part-time librarians and the teachers will go to them. It can be quite specific when it comes to secondary so you have to know your subject.
To be a librarian you need a good general knowledge, many of us have degrees in English, then completed a postgraduate degree in librarianship. My knowledge is quite general!
Becoming a Carnegie Medal judge was a dream come true for me. I’ve been a member of our Youth Libraries Group (YLG) for more years than I care to remember and through this, the chance came up to be a judge. We nominate books as a branch and individual librarians recommended books, too, so that we can compile a really good long list. We spend a whole day looking at books – it’s fantastic because these days we don’t have a great deal of time to do this in our normal working day. Our choices go onto the national long list, which has about 40 or 50 titles on it.
The judging for the short list is taken very seriously. We come together as a committee and discuss and debate. The judges get very passionate about the books. If they don’t like it, they won’t mince their words, and will work hard to convince others about a particular book. It is quite a task reaching the short list as there are such good books – so many on the long list deserved to go through.
Another part of my role is to support the Shadowing Scheme which involves visiting schools and discussing the books with young people. When I was at school, I had often read the books before we read them in class, so when it came to analysing them in class, it almost killed the books for me.
It’s interesting being a judge because of that experience – to read again in such an analytical way was quite tricky after reading for pleasure for so many years.
If the books I’ve read at that depth give me such pleasure, I’m sure reading them for pleasure with the children will be even better.