SPARK: Sharing, Partnering and Reaching for Knowledge AN INNOVATIVE ACADEMIC, PUBLIC AND SCHOOL LIBRARY PARTNERSHIP By Christy Reynolds A UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN PUBLIC, ACADEMIC, AND SCHOOL LIBRARIANS created a collaborative program to support educational and literacy goals for all students in the Tomball community. Tomball ISD, Lone Star College- Tomball, and Harris County Public Library/LSC-Tomball Community Library combined forces in early April 2021 to establish SPARK (Sharing, Partnering and Reaching for Knowledge), a four-part collaborative effort to bring accessible literacy and resources to students in their community. This innovative idea began with an existing partnership, a creative initiative called Tomball Community Art Showcase (TCAS) where the artwork of Tomball ISD students was displayed on rotation at the LSC Tomball Community Library. Director of the LSC-Tomball Community Library, Janna Hoglund says, “We wanted to extend the partnership with Tomball ISD directly between the libraries. Our public and academic libraries have a very close relationship with the school libraries, and we wanted to create something great and share our resources.” Soon the librarians were engaged in a conversation about extending online resources between the teachers, instructors, and librarians across Tomball ISD’s 23 different campuses. Hoglund met with Diane Tidwell, the director of Digital Learning for Tomball ISD, who coordinates the work of all librarians within the school district. The next step was to gather feedback from librarians to determine support for the potential partnership. There was a lot of excitement among librarians at the idea of being able to share resources across the academic, public, and school libraries. In late April 2021, all the librarians in Tomball ISD met online with the LSC Community Library staff and started sharing and drafting ideas for ways they could work together. “COVID brought us so many negative things, but in every
cloud, there is a silver lining. We found a huge benefit in this because after being away from people and not being engaged so much in person, lacking action, prompted us to build this partnership and everybody was so excited to do things online - we just wanted action. I think this came from some time of inactivity into the perfect stream of energy,” Hoglund said. Three major concepts came from the meeting: accessibility; innovation and creativity; and collaboration and communication. First, the public library has more extensive resources than the school libraries and librarians wanted to provide convenient, expanded access to other libraries in their community. Secondly, they wanted to incorporate new ideas, services and attend each other’s events to promote new creative initiatives between the groups. And finally, there was a need for a streamlined form of communication- leading to a working group created to continue the work and to sharpen the scope of the project. Out of these three concepts emerged four major areas to be addressed: library cards, resource sharing, library learning
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