See below for news and updates happening in the library.

Kia ora,

It’s been another year of action and change in the library. We moved into a new space and recruited Student Librarians for the first time. We ended the year with a team of 19 dedicated Student Librarians who volunteered at break times and helped process over 1300 new books to add to our collections. We are very grateful for all the hard work of our Team Leaders Cholula Brown, Emma Cartlidge, Ben Pell, Mackenzie Smith, Caspar Waddington, and Zoe Waddington and our Student Librarians Emily Anderson, Iyaz Basco, Tibor Boda, Malcie Cervelli, Caleb Cotton-Everitt, Emily Heathorn, Jade Lunny, Paige Lunny, Asha McPhee, Lennox Millar, Fabian Stanley, Matilda van Urquhart, and Arlo Waddington.

In another first this year, we had a team of four Year 9 readers contesting the inaugural Otago Readers’ Cup competition. It was great fun and we hope to take up the challenge again next year.

We celebrated Aotearoa New Zealand School Library Week with activities and competitions and our prizewinning bookmarks have been popular with students. We also created displays in the library to promote Pink Shirt Day, Mental Health Awareness Week, and Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, and to celebrate Schools Pride, Out on the Shelves and the winners of the New Zealand Book Awards For Children And Young Adults (of which I was privileged to be a judge.)

We enjoyed hosting Chess Club with Mr Waddington and Mr Hermanns every Tuesday lunchtime and chess sets have been our most popular borrowable item with 1800 issues. The Chess Club award for finishing at the top of the Chess Ladder this year went to Kio Haines. We will be able to expand our collection of borrowable board games next year thanks to a generous grant which we recently received from Te Hau Toka Southern Lakes Wellbeing Group.

Students and staff continue to enjoy access to our amazing digital collection of over 2400 eBooks and 1200 eAudiobooks available through our Wheelers ePlatform. Including a carefully curated Wellness Collection. Students are encouraged to make the most of the platform’s accessibility features such as dyslexia-friendly fonts, text-to-speech, and translation to different languages.

We have issued over 7000 physical books, 1000 eBooks, and 320 Audiobooks this year. Our most popular book overall was the graphic novel Guts by Raina Telgemeier which was issued 50 times. Our most popular fiction series was Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy and our most popular manga series was Demon Slayer by Koyoharu Gotouge. Our most popular eBook, for the third year in a row, was One of us is lying by Karen M. McManus. Our best borrower overall for 2023 was Finlay Brown, who issued 193 books this year. Our best borrowers by year group were Ruby Bull Y7, Indee Briggs Y8, Sophia Pullar Y9, Elijah Valentin Y10, and the senior award went to Ben Pell.

Remember you can access our MAC ePlatform digital collection 24/7 wherever you are during these holidays. Sign in using your MAC login through the link on our library homepage, library.mtaspiring.school.nz, or download and install the Wheelers ePlatform app on to your device, select Mount Aspiring College Library, and then sign in using your MAC login.

Happy summer reading!

Ngā mihi,

Maia, Kenna, and Ruth