For school libraries to survive and thrive in current times, and therefore be in a position to deliver the literacy and wellbeing benefits outlined in this book, they must be willing to shout about what they do from the rooftops and actively and consistently market the benefits they bring to students’ schooling lives. To compete with the other diverse demands for resourcing within schools, school libraries and their staff need to be able to clearly and comprehensively articulate the specific benefits they offer for students and their learning.

This comes down to effective advocacy, but there are a number of challenges to visibility and advocacy for school libraries and staff that need to be considered, and this is a problem across many nations. For example, Loh et al. (2019) found that the invisibility of the school library professional's work remains a problem across Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. My own research ‘calls for increasing teacher librarian advocacy and awareness raising of their role as educators’, contending that

When I started to plan and then write this chapter on challenges to visibility and advocacy for school libraries and staff, it was clear that this chapter could constitute a book in itself. As such, the challenges that I have decided to focus on here are just a small subsample of considerations.

Challenges of the professional role and burgeoning workload

First, as I have clearly illustrated in Chapter 1, the complexity of the role of school library professionals can be immense, and therefore there is an ongoing risk that literacy and wellbeing related aspects of the role will be crowded out. I include the challenge of the professional role and burgeoning workload here because I feel that you may have sensed them as the elephant in the room as you read Chapter 1, which presented an incredibly diverse and presumably continually diversifying role expected in job description documents (JDFs), which might also be reasonably expected to be even more diverse in practice, given the aforementioned applied salience criteria which limited the role scope and the unspecified ‘other duties’ commonly alluded to.