End of Year (EOY) 2018-2019 State of the Collection

Circulations were down a bit in 2018-2019 (2312) versus 2017-2018 (2959). One impression that I have is that there were more instances of students checking out books that they did not seem interested in and simply held on to the same book all year long.

This year I also broke down the outstanding check outs (missing books) and fines by school site:

• APEX
• $3192.36 (118 unreturned library books)
• $  16.00 (local fines only)
• HBHS
• $5868.84 (262 unreturned library books)
• $ 855.83 (includes all LAUSD library fines)
• STEM
• $ 679.11 (31 unreturned library books)
• $ 321.30 (includes all LAUSD library fines)
• GONE/UNKNOWN 
• $ 115.33 (5 books)
• $  39.95 (local fines only)

As you might infer from the statistics above, HBHS uses the library the most, followed by APEX, followed by STEM. HBHS enrollment is about 650 and STEM enrollment is about 540. APEX was about 375 (grades 7-12) in the Fall 2018 upload to Destiny.

Adjusting the 2019 School Library Journal (SLJ) estimates of the average cost of school library books for high schools to include processing fees, we can expect to spend about $22 for fiction books, about $40 for nonfiction books, and about $25 for graphic novels.

The per book estimates will be useful for proposing a library budget for upcoming years.  More on that later...

Tone and Style Analysis

Are you worried about the style analysis essay on the AP English Lit exam?  The library is a great place to practice your skills with a multitude of texts in a variety of forms.

An effective starting point for learning about style analysis is to learn some jargon related to literary analysis. This will be a great help to you throughout the course and the exam, and is absolutely necessary for the free-response essays.

Let's think about emotions as a way to label an author's tone. A poem can be happy or sad or angry, but an effective AP analysis requires more sophisticated vocabulary. Fortunately, your librarian can help.

Image: Machine Elf 1735 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The image above shows Plutchik's "wheel of emotions" that can help you build your vocabulary to improve your identification of an author's tones. Come to the library to learn how to read the wheel (hint: it's more like a pyramid), see another way of looking at it, and to practice with some fun texts.