AMTR

Apparently, this is the big Kahuna of reports. The state mandated AMTR--Annual Media and Technology Report. Maddie has been laboring over this for days. She showed me the final copy she's getting ready to enter online. Twelve pages of numbers and categories for those numbers. She says the report is fewer pages, but more sophisticated in its questions this year. Several scans of the internet and calls to county tech support to find out exactly which Pentium processors need to be reported where on the sheet. And emails to the warehouse to find out what's on the RMS shelves there. And this after she and Robin have scoured the building to account for all 300+ computers on site.

In reviewing the report I was surprised to find that she has 18 iPods. She can't circulate them to students, but they were purchased with the intent that staff would use them. She hasn't been able to generate interest. When I worked at CCL, we circulated iPods to staff members and couldn't keep them in the library. But we were able to purchase audiobooks related to our leadership/business collection. Staff members listened to them on their daily commute to work and also as they traveled on business. Maddie doesn't have mp3 audiobooks in her budget, tho NCLIVE has just made several hundred available. Maybe once the AMTR is done, we can look at the NCLIVE collection and brainstorm about how to promote them.

But the big point of discussion in our review of her AMTR was her suggestion to ECU faculty that they create a class that focused on the "daily details" of school media that includes record keeping with this type of reporting in mind. As I've listened to Maddie discuss her work over the past couple of years, items like weeding, catalog maintenance, stats, inventory and year end reports have always weighed heavily on my mind. If I do end up in a school setting, my internship has exposed me to them, but I could certainly have used a class detailing best practices for accomplishing them. This is an important gap in my education. As are classroom management and web page design and maintenance. I know ECU can't teach everything, but Maddie's suggestion is spot on. I'm taking an incomplete in this class until my internship is finished as ECU's semester has ended, but I'm so glad to be here at this time to actually see the year-end requirements. Maddie says she's going to tell Dr. Dotson not to graduate me until I come back in August to see how the school year starts. Don't listen to her, Dr. D! (even tho she's probably right . . . )