I’m happy to share with you the first part of my annual library report that I created in Microsoft Word.  Each media center in our district is mandated to submit an annual report; in the past, we shared program highlights related to each of the four roles under Information Power, but I’m excited that we have transitioned to the five roles from Empowering Learners for this year’s report.

I always struggle with finding a balance in the information and data I include as I don’t want to have so much that it overwhelms a reader—it is easy to go overboard on charts/graphs/quotes—but of the four annual reports I’ve written, I think I’m happiest with this year’s edition. I think I’ve improved the narratives and organization this year as well as the use of graphics and media; I also love the Word template I selected to create the report because it looks clean and streamlined yet professional. Each year I try to incorporate a new element into my reports, and this year, I thought it would be fun to incorporate QR codes linking to specific web resources or videos related to a section of the annual report.  In addition, I love the addition of the teacher quote sidebars into this year’s annual report—these “impact” statements were very humbling to read, and I am so grateful to work with colleagues who let me share the joy the joy of teaching and learning with them and their students.  A heartfelt thank you to my faculty who were able to share such powerful statements for inclusion in this year’s annual report.

While writing the annual report is truly a labor of love and quite time intensive for me, I also find it a valuable reflective exercise as it helps me to really connect dots of patterns I’ve observed over the last year, consider what didn’t work as planned and how to approach those challenges in the future, and to see the successes of the program that are so easy to overlook when you’re in the throes of daily library life.  The process also helps me start to crystallize ideas that have been simmering and take initial steps toward writing next year’s program goals/themes for the upcoming year.

I’ll be creating the annual report and video (in the same vein as last year’s) later this week, so look for a followup post here in which I’ll share the multimedia elements of the library annual report!