by opinions editor Elise Sawyer and staff reporter Medha Sarin
photo by assistant principal Mike McEver
Three years ago, after working as an English teacher for over a decade at AMCHS, Chauncey Lindner became the school librarian. On March 6, 2020, the Roar interviewed him about the role libraries have gained in schools and how he’s adapted Consol’s library for students’ changing needs.
What do you do as a librarian?
When [classes are] in here doing research, sometimes I teach lessons on how to use the research databases and our catalog. Other days, I do more of the office work: cataloguing books, selecting new books for purchase and making sure that the collection is in order. We do what we call “shelf reading”, which is keeping the books in order and presentable.
What do students typically use the library for?
In the mornings, especially, there’s a lot of frenzied printing. I think it’s just the basic condition of human life that no one’s home printer ever has toner in it. Or paper. I think a lot of students who finish their homework at home in the evening come in in the morning and print it. Then, during the day, most of the students we see are the students who come in with their classes to do whatever work their class is doing. After school, it’s mostly students who are just kind of hanging out. Using it for social space. You see a few people sitting and doing their homework and stuff, but largely, people use the computers, they sit and study, many of them possibly are waiting for a ride, that sort of thing. It’s much less frenzied after school than it is before school.
How has research changed over the years that you’ve been here?
When I started out as an English teacher, at least some of the resources in students’ research projects were required to be print materials. As years have gone on, we see fewer and fewer students using print materials for resources, and it’s not unreasonable. We have greater and greater amounts and variety of information available to students in the online databases we subscribe to. In a lot of cases, those databases have more up-to-date information than the nonfiction books we have, because unless we replace our nonfiction books constantly, they go out of date pretty quickly. It’s very rare that a student will pick up a nonfiction book for the purposes of fulfilling a research assignment.
Why have you chosen to have puzzles and coloring supplies in the library as well as books?
I’m really just trying to find ways to get people in the door. You wouldn’t believe how often students come in for a class, look around, then tell me, “I’ve never been in here before”. My goal was for the library to be kind of a central hub of the culture of the school. Not just a room full of dusty old books, and not just a computer lab, but a place where people can meet up with their friends to study, or sit together at the casual table and relax and de-stress a little bit.
What books are most popular?
The vast majority of the circulation in this library is manga. The students who read manga will check out three or four books at a time, in some cases two or three times a day. One student might circulate 10 items a day, every day. After that, [a book’s popularity] comes in waves. Last year, it was The Hate You Give. I couldn’t keep a copy on the shelf despite the fact that I own about five of those [books]. The books that flash into the popular consciousness and are like the thing at the moment circulate really, really well. Then, there’s some that never go out of style. My Harry Potter books circulate kind of constantly.
What are your thoughts on the diversity of the books in the library?
Open access to information is like a core part of my philosophy of how a library should work. I’m really striving to make that happen in our library, which is an interesting dance to dance sometimes. I do have to remember that everyone here is a young adult. There are books I think are valuable to the general public that I don’t have on the shelf in this library because I don’t know that they’re a good fit for our population inside of this building.
How do you see school libraries changing in the future?
I think that [nonfiction book] collections are going to shrink. I was speaking with a librarian recently who doesn’t keep any nonfiction in the library, because the students just don’t use it at all, and has dedicated that space to study areas, computers, and a makerspace. As I weed the nonfiction right now, I’m finding that there’s lots and lots of books that haven’t moved in a very very long time, and I’m starting to think about how viable it is to dedicate a large amount of shelf space to nonfiction if it’s not useful to the students. Our education is so much more tech-dense now. If you don’t have regular access to a computer, it’s really going to get in the way of your ability to take care of your business at Consol. The more tech-dense our education gets, the more I feel like the school libraries will be used for that purpose because it is the most easily accessible computer lab in the building.
What are some notable experiences you’ve had as a librarian?
There was a saleswoman. It’s not an exaggeration to say that she’s at least 80 years old and used a walker. She would have sacks of books hanging off her walker at all angles. I was always convinced something terrible is going to happen. She would come in [to the library], go into my office and spread out all [the books] in this beautiful array on the table. When she was ready, she’d finally invite me in. She’d spend about five minutes telling me about the book she had available for me to buy and then about 15 minutes telling me about her grandkids. Then she’d pack it all back up again, hang it all over her walker, refuse my offer to help her with all that stuff, and be on her way. I don’t know if I ever bought a book from her, but I knew all about her family.
Some other good experiences I’ve had in the library: on several different occasions, students have come in with an English teacher who is asking them to pick out a book. The student will just walk over to a shelf, grab a random book, check it out, and leave with no intention of reading it. But on a number of occasions, I’ve been able to catch a student who’s in that situation and say, “You know what, let me actually help you find a book. What did you last read that interested you?” or “What do you watch on TV?”. If the student can give me any place at all to start, I can usually get them linked up with a book. I’ve had [students] come back when they’re done and tell me, “That’s the first book I read in high school,” “That’s the first book I’ve read since I was five.” When people who thought they had lost the habit of reading come back to it, that’s really cool for me.
How has the quarantine impacted the library, and what are your responsibilities now?
Since the school building has been closed, my responsibilities have changed quite a bit. At first, I was consulted about checking out devices from the library’s collection to students who did not have reliable, internet-capable devices to use at home for at-home learning. However, I was not involved in the checkout process itself; the district tried to keep a minimal number of people on campus to decrease the chance of spreading COVID, and since the APs were already on campus, they handled the distribution of devices. As the librarian, I am also a member of the campus leadership team, which means I meet once a week with department heads and administrators. Our meetings have been held via Google Meet since campus closed. We have been working hard to brainstorm ideas for effective at-home education, the possibility of holding prom and graduation at a later date, and ways to celebrate our graduating seniors. In addition to the above-listed ways in which my job has changed, I’m still doing some of the parts of my job that I’d do during a normal semester—I’m reading book reviews to determine which books to add to the collection in the future, disseminating information from leadership team meetings to members of my department, and handling end-of-year budget concerns.
