At the end of August, the CPD team ran a member driven webinar titled Maximising your school library budget: achieving more with less. This professional development really hit the spot, with over 180 registrations and phenomenal feedback, it was clearly what library professionals needed. Barbara McGuigan, Letisha Stevenson, Melinda Hultgren who are employed in different roles, in schools of varying sizes and across different sectors offered their candid and innovative approaches to making the most of their budget.

To compliment the webinar, our Professional Development Team put together a few tips and tricks that they have when maximising their budget. If you missed out on registering for the webinar, you can always catch up here, remember, free for ALIA members and $55 for non-members.

Our final webinar for 2025 is fitting. A year ago, we heard from Dr Kay Oddone in her presentation AI in education: navigating a perfect storm. We know all too well that the AI landscape is rapidly changing - everytime we check in, there is a new tool, guideline or bot. Our conversation on AI is definitely overdue and Matthew Easterman is here for that chat!

Tell us about yourself. How did you end up becoming a librarian in a school? I was originally a secondary English teacher and was always drawn to the Library space. When I had my babies, I studied, largely online, to gain a Grad Dip in Information Management at RMIT. In 2022, I was tutoring at a school to help students who struggled with their class work during the pandemic and when the Library Manager left, I jumped at the opportunity! I'm now a teacher librarian Alphington Grammar School in Melbourne.

What does your role look like on a day-to-day basis? I teach library classes across Years 5-9, so a large portion of my time is spent planning and delivering lessons. I also spend some time each day on the desk returning and checking out books.

What is one of the most successful programs/events you run in the Library? We run reading challenges for each year level. Each class in the year level competes against the others to win a pizza lunch at Years 5 and 6 and a trip to the cinema for Years 7-9. The class as a whole has to cover a certain number of books in different formats and genres and words are deducted from the class total for overdues. It's very effective and keeps us very busy!

I am aware that school libraries are undervalued in a lot of schools at the moment and this is a challenge facing us all, whether it applies to our particular school library or not. I think it's important to evolve to meet the needs of our school communities so, for example, we are fortunate to be leading the school with AI at the moment.

I love libraries because… For so many reasons. I have always loved reading and discussing literature. I love building community through shared interests and fun and engaging activities. I also enjoy learning and technology. Libraries bring so much joy to so many people and I am really grateful to work in this field!

Our research team are always uploading new content in the research section of our website and endeavour to provide Open Access evidence based research. Some articles will need to be accessed through your State Library. If you want to get involved in research then share your experiences of supporting students to be independent, critical and creative thinkers . This research project is being undertaken as part of the requirements of a PhD at Edith Cowan University. (Only open to accredited teachers/teacher librarians).

You are a writer of both young adult and children’s fiction. What influenced you to become a writer?. I kind of became a writer by accident. I went to do an internship at the television show Good News Week in 1997. I wanted to work with the assistant director. She wasn’t there that day, so they put me in with the writers. They discovered I had the knack for writing jokes. They offered me a job. I stayed there for three years and I’ve worked as a writer ever since. I did ten years in television, then started writing more and more books and less and less TV..