Mission & Goals

Mission

Author Jenny Nimmo, visited and read to the 3rd grade class.

The mission of the San Francisco Day School library media program is to ensure that our students are effective users of ideas and information. This mission is accomplished by providing intellectual and physical access to materials in all formats, by providing instruction to foster competence and stimulate interest in reading, viewing, and using information and ideas, and by working with other educators to design learning strategies to meet the needs of individual students.

Our mission focuses on offering programs and services that are centered on information literacy and that are designed around active, authentic student learning.

The goals of our library media program point to the development of a community of learners that is centered on the student and sustained by a creative, energetic library media program.

Library Media Program goals are:

1. To provide intellectual access to information through learning activities that are integrated into the curriculum and that help all students achieve information literacy by developing effective cognitive strategies for selecting, retrieving, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, creating, and communicating information in all formats and in all content areas of the curriculum

2. To provide physical access to information through

a. a carefully selected and systematically organized collection of diverse learning resources that represent a wide range of subjects, levels of difficulty, and formats;

b. a systematic procedure for acquiring information and materials from outside the library media center and the school through electronic resources, interlibrary loan, and with other information agencies; and instruction in using a range of equipment for accessing local and remote information in any format

3. To provide learning experiences that encourage students to become discriminating consumers and skilled creators of information through comprehensive instruction related to the full range of communications media and technology.

4. To provide collaboration, and assistance to teachers in applying principles of instructional design to the use of instructional and information technology for learning

5. To provide resources and activities that contribute to lifelong learning while accommodating a wide range of differences in teaching and learning styles

6. To provide a program that functions as the information center of the school, both through offering a place for integrated and interdisciplinary learning activities within the school and through offering access to a full range of information for learning beyond our school

7. To provide resources and activities for learning that represent a diversity of experiences, opinions, and social and cultural perspectives and to support the concept that intellectual freedom and access to information are prerequisite to effective and responsible citizenship in a democracy.

The San Francisco Day School mission statement and goals are inspired by Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning. (1998) American Library Association and Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Permission to publish has been granted by ALA and AECT.