Going the Extra Mile: What Makes School Librarians Proactive?

Abstract

This paper reports on a second round of analysis (conducted in 2012-13) of the results of the national surveys of UK school libraries completed in 2010, involving self-eported activities and priorities of 803 school librarians. This further analysis highlighted four aspects of proactive school library manager behaviour relating to their approaches to: promoting reading for pleasure, information literacy development, collaborating with teachers , and actively exploiting ICT within the school. Various levers or drivers that are associated with proactive library managers were then identified from the survey findings. These are: supervision by senior managers and ready access to them; active development planning; the library manager's academic and professional qualifications. The relative strengths of each of these drivers were assessed from the data.