Domain 1:
Planning and Preparation

In order to make the high school library website more accessible, user-friendly, and responsible to students' research needs, one of my priorities was to completely revamp it.  This entailed changing the font to Lexend, a "variable font empirically shown to significantly improve reading proficiency" (lexend.com) and including alt text for images to make the site more accessible to a wide variety of readers, including top-of-page table of contents to make content easier to access, and providing redesigned tables of resources to make it easier for students to conduct research.

The library website is inaccessible to non-FASNY viewers, but the images below provide a before-and-after view of the library website as it existed prior to my arrival and the changes made since I took over the FASNY high school library. The first set of images is of the front page of the high school library website, and below those are two image carousels highlighting some of the changes to the library website that I've made.

Some of the most prolific users of FASNY's library collection are students in history classes; in grades 9-12, students write several history research papers each year, and some of the 11IB students choose to write their Extended Essays in history.  Additionally, students in English classes are often required to write research papers, and some 11IB students write their Extended Essays in English.

In order to meet the research needs of FASNY students, while both working with the space constraints of our library and providing access to the types of research teachers require of students, I added both an extensive collection of ebooks, along with several history databases, to our electronic resource collection. I was able to do so by analyzing the database usage statistics, canceling subscriptions to those that were underutilized, and reallocating those funds to the new electronic resources.

As a result, I added over 6500 ebooks to the collection (5700 of which are nonfiction) and increased the history databases we had from two to five--an increase of 250%.

An ongoing challenge faculty at FASNY have is helping students determining whether websites are credible, and therefore appropriate for school research. In order to support the work of faculty and the research of students, I have created several resources for determining credible sources. One resource I have created is a curated collection on the library website of credible online sources, organized into tables and divided by subjects. Additional resources I have created are one-page flyers on using both the SIFT method of Lateral Reading, and the CRAAP method of source investigation, to determine credibility; these flyers are available on the library website and are shared with teachers and students when I conduct lessons on determining source credibility.