Teaching: Book Mending

For my teaching experience I channeled the presentation skills I have mastered within the last five quarters to share my knowledge of book mending with future librarians. My book mending skills come from what I have learned as a volunteer with the Seattle Public Library over the last two years. I have seen first-hand how mending can revitalize a collection and give life to books that would otherwise no longer be in circulation. My goal was to show how mending can be utilized to help libraries save money and increase circulation.

I began the project by scheduling a room and sending an email to various iSchool lists to gauge potential interest. I geared the class toward those interested in mending solely to extend the circulation life-cycle of a book. Furthermore, I explained that while we will be using some archival approved materials, the class would not cover preservation in the archive tradition. I clarified this early in the process in order to make sure my expectations for the class matched those of my prospective students. I received twenty-five responses – eighteen people who could make the class and seven others who wanted to cme, but could not make it. Due to the large response, I decided to create a video that I could use within the class. I was worried that it would be difficult to cover the various processes in detail for a class of that size. Furthermore, I could then provide the video to those who could not make it.

I provided the students with books and mending supplies. In order to make the class more interesting I gave students the opportunity to mend a book that they broke. This allowed the students to become familiar with the many parts of a book while providing insight into how books become damaged during circulation. The students were also given the option to keep their repaired book for future reference.

I learned the most from the problems I encountered. First, the supplies I ordered were sent to the wrong address and I did not locate them until after the presentation. Fortunately, the Fiction department at SPL was kind enough to lend me supplies a day before the class. Second, the audio for the video I created would not play the day of the class. The technical support staff of Mary Gates Hall even called in their supervisor who could not figure out the problem and apologized to the class on my behalf. As a result, I ended up changing the structure of the class five minutes after it had started. Luckily, only twelve people showed up (six less than I had anticipated) so I was able to arrange the tables in such a way that I could demonstrate each step from a table at the head of the classroom. While the video did not work, I feel that the process of making the video provided valuable practice I may not have had otherwise. In addition, the support and understanding of my fellow iSchool classmates contributed to the overall success of the class. In fact one student who I had not met before the class said she was happy the video did not work and that she hoped I would continue to teach!

In the end, I feel that thorough planning and leaving room for improvisation are imperative to the teaching process. While I had only been in LIS560 for two weeks before the class, I tried to incorporate parts of the ARCS model into my presentation. I started off the class by asking each student about their expectations for the class and made sure what we covered was relevant. Having the students break the books ended up providing much more of an attention factor than I had anticipated. In order to foster confidence I made sure each student was able to successfully mend a book. I also gave students the opportunity to suggest improvements and learned quite a bit from this process. Lastly, my students left feeling the satisfaction that comes from fixing a broken book and had a trophy in the form of a mended book to show for it. I also had one student ask if SPL needed more volunteers which was all I needed to hear to know the class was a success.