End of Week 1

Strange week this week, children were very fidgety and hard to settle. Always difficult after a 3 week vacation but the atmosphere generally was a little unsettled. Quite a few students have left over the holidays and there are several more leaving at Chinese New Year with only a few new students coming in. Added to this, there are only 3 weeks until the Chinese New Year holiday and it makes for an unusual atmosphere.

On a more positive note, the website is coming along nicely. Launched it at the Monday Staff meeting and have started to add in topic links and get feedback from the teaching staff. Also introduced it to my new Library monitors at our Tuesday afternoon activity and they seemed quite happy. I have 9 students who spent their time on Tuesday drawing maps of the Library layout. It was a very worthwhile exercise and they all agreed there was much more to the Library than they had thought at the start. Next week, we are going to look at alphabetical order.

Last thing on Friday the Oliver conversion data came back so the big task for the coming week will be to get the IT techs to install it and see what it looks like. Fingers crossed it will be okay and we can get going any hiccups sorted out before CNY. Then there will be some great opportunities to share the OPAC with the students...they've never used one here before!

Couple of great parent helpers this week motivated me to start covering the new books. Between us we must have covered around 50 so the pile on the work table doesn't look half so daunting now. If we can get Oliver up and running, I can catalogue the new books and let the students borrow them which would be excellent.

Other exciting event next week is the first official meeting of the Shanghai Librarians Group. We will meet Rego and hopefully there will be about 6 - 10 attending. It will be brilliant to get things off the ground and start a professional network.