Project Box Know How

If you loan groups of resources to teachers on a regular basis – have you tried using our helpful and time saving project box tool in Reading Cloud?

Our project box function enables you to issue a collection of related resources by theme or topic as one item or “project box loan”. Often used by schools library services as a way of loaning collections to schools, project boxes are an effective way of managing and tracking resources.

School librarians who regularly loan groups of resources throughout the term will find our project box function an invaluable collection management tool. As long as it has been catalogued and is on the library system and barcoded, any item can be added to a box to accompany the book resources such as artefacts, posters or worksheets.

This example of a project box record card shows the depth of information that can be included and the flexibility to issue, return, reserve and add to a project box.

In busy primary schools where resources are often in high demand, creating topic boxes from existing books in your library are an easy way to support whole school staff access teaching resources more easily. As these books will already be on your online school library system keeping track of them will make returns easier too.

Here are 5 ways that creating project boxes could benefit the management of loans with your school audience:

• Topic boxes can be reserved in advance to help with lesson and coursework planning.
• Items can be added or removed from a box even when it is on loan should more curricular resources be required by the teacher.
• Either a temporary short loan box or a more permanent box which ties in every year with key themes covered at that time in the school term can be created.
• Once a box is created a list of contents can be printed to accompany the box when it is issued to the member of staff.
• Project box usage and popularity can be tracked through different reports which can be shared as part of library usage reporting to senior school leaders.

Find out more about the project box module.

Written by Sue Polchow MCLIP, Reading Cloud Library Adviser.