Our May Webinar with Jacqueline Harvey, was absolutely exceptional and the feedback from participants has been so positive! You clearly loved this professional development!. Not only is Jacqueline a brilliant author of children's books, she is an educator with incredible knowledge in about how best to engage students with literature. She did not fail to deliver on her promise to share innovative ideas and secrets discussing some wonderful resources that many of us had never hear of! If you weren't one of the nearly 200 library professionals registered and feel like you missed out, then you can always purchase the recording, or get it free with your ALIA Membership.

UP COMING For many of us it is nearly budget time in the library. With ever-shrinking budgets, decreased staffing, and a surprising number of books published before 1986, the experience of the average school library staff member can often seem worlds away from the Instagram-perfect libraries we often see online.

ALIA Membership - Did you know? Did you know that ALIA Schools webinars are free for ALIA members? If you are not already an ALIA member, now is a great time to sign up and reap the benefits.

A night to remember! Book Week is just around the corner, and if you are in Melbourne, there is no better way to celebrate than by joining the ALIAVic group for their Book Week Soirée at the State Library of Victoria on Friday 22 August.

Tell us about yourself. How did you end up becoming a librarian in a school? A little over a decade ago I got my first ever library job, in a joint-use library and realised that was my dream workplace. So I got my degree and job-hopped a little until my current role as Library Manager ‑ Kununurra Community and School Library.

What does your role look like on a day-to-day basis? No two days in the life of librarian at a school and community library are the same. During the school term the library is buzzing with teachers and students and during the school holiday the library is buzzing with travellers and people looking for somewhere to escape the heat and relax with a book and or their kids. Most days I am planning for an upcoming program or event or acquitting one we’ve just done but the best part of my job is supporting and encouraging my team of talented and passionate library officers.

What is one of the most successful programs/events you run in the Library? Our most successful event is unequivocally The Kimberley Writers Festival. The festival has become one that Australian authors are excited to be invited to so we are able to secure some amazing talent to spend a weekend with our community members talking about books and publishing, laughing about life and enjoying the spectacular sights of Miriwoong country here in Kununurra.

One of our current challenges centres around activities for young people after school. There aren’t many after-school care options for families in town and so children spend many hours in the library in the afternoons.

I love libraries because… they are a safe and welcoming place to people from all walks of life and all ages and stages. They provide an opportunity to learn without prejudice and to connect without judgement. Libraries, especially in regional and remote areas, are more than just a house of books.

Free, online and respectful of all voices.

ALIA and ACORD invite you to join the Schools Cataloguing Community of Practice, a vendor-neutral forum for discussion and sharing on bibliographic metadata and information discoverability in school libraries.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm an Adelaide-based illustrator living with autism and ADHD. I was originally born in Korea, but was adopted by Australian parents and grew up in regional NSW. I think these things about me probably influence my art a lot, because I always had trouble fitting in and worried about being different, which led to me immersing myself in fiction a lot.

How did you become and illustrator? I've drawn from the time I could hold a crayon, and just never stopped. As a child I spent hours making stapled notepaper books to loan out from my own library (cubbyhouse) to the neighbourhood kids, even if they were unfortunately never returned. Anyway, after high school I moved to the city to study Visual Communications at university, where I specialised in illustration. I've done freelance jobs and workshops on and off ever since, but always alongside other work or responsibilities, including raising my two sons.

There must be a lot of pressure to bring a book character to life, what does your process look like? When I've illustrated books by another author, the process always started with reading their story and the brief. There was an outline for how they imagined the characters and what they wanted depicted for each page. After that I would sketch up the character before having the design reviewed, and then I'd move onto the individual page sketches

Can you walk us through what one of your illustrator visits would look like? I arrive, setup, then everyone rocks in and I show them how to create and draw characters in my style. It's fully practical, completely interactive, and hopefully a lot of fun. Usually people tell me they learned something at least, and often students will say they didn't realise they could draw so well which I'm always so chuffed to hear. I always encourage participants to think about their character in detail, especially the type of story they are from, so it's a fun way to engage the imagination and even start a new project for those who might want to go home and build on their idea once the workshop ends.

This was before the internet really happened, so a lot of things you could only reference in a book, but even today when so much is accessible online, a library's worth is hard to define. It's so many things rolled into one! It's a one-stop resource for information, inspiration and imagination, literacy and learning, connection and community, and a school library is that vital first exposure to all of these things that is shared by every student. The joy of borrowing a book, of sitting in a peaceful space, and all the special library sights, sounds and smells... mwah! Chef's kiss! In case you hadn't gathered, I really love libraries.