School Library Card Project Outline

What you need:

1. Membership forms – to collect member information and confirm parental agreement.
2. School contact
3. Library staff assigned to input membership data & create cards
4. Membership Cards
5. Tracking system
6. Delivery system

Membership forms

Share this form with your school contact. Ideally a form would be sent home and returned with parental approval for each and every child!

A great way to do this would be for teachers to send the form home with all the other school forms during the first week of school. Other ideal times to get these forms signed: Parent-Teacher night, Family Literacy Events, just before Spring Break or Summer Vacation!

School contact

Who at the school is your communication point, and your School Library Card Project advocate? Some schools focus on Kindergarten to get every new student off to a great start with a library card, others go class by class and try to get each and every student signed up. One thing is for certain, to be successful, this project needs a school staff advocate to keep it moving and ensure that membership forms are filled out and collected, and to facilitate distribution of cards once the library has processed them.  

Library staff assigned to input membership data & create cards

Important questions to ask:

• Who on your team is processing memberships?
• Is this work being done at the front desk during slow times? Is this an off-desk task assigned to one or two staff?
• If this work is being done at the desk, how is patron information being protected to ensure it isn’t left out where other patrons can view or interfere with it?
• Where are forms being stored to ensure that information privacy is protected?
• How are cards being delivered to their recipients? Is a teacher coming to pick them up? Are they being dropped off during a school visit. Are students picking them up at a tour of the library?

Membership Cards

It is crucial to keep track of which card number is attached to each membership. We recommend using a fine point sharpee to print the name of each student on the back of the form, and to include the temporary pin on the top of the form. We suggest using the last four digits of the phone number provided, put an simple sequence of 4 numbers will do the trick—just make sure to let them know what it is.

Tracking system

How many cards are coming in? what school did they come from? What date do they expect them back by? Which staff member is assigned to complete this work? How are they being delivered to their recipients. Here is a form that you can download and use to track all of the pertinent information!

Delivery system

How are forms being collected, and how are cards being delivered? This is the crucial final step to the process! Here are some suggestions for how you can close the loop.

• School authority can pick up the cards to deliver in the classroom. This should be someone who would naturally have access to student information at the school, like a teacher or principal. (this ensures that someone who would NOT have access to student information doesn’t accidentally get it while handling the completed forms.)
• Library Staff can deliver the forms to the school during a school visit, literacy night, or just as a workday errand.  
• The important thing to consider is keeping student information private. Use Manilla Envelopes, keep them sealed until they are delivered to the appropriate distributer.