During the second semester of the school term 2000-2001 for a period of 25 days
at each site, within a four month period, through observations, interviews and written
documents, I collected data about key participants and the daily activities of four school
library media specialists in a parish public school system in Louisiana. During the data
collection period, I visited the sites during various times of the day and sometimes an
entire day. Often I visited one school library media center in the morning and another in
the afternoon. Through answering four guiding research questions, I gained basic
understandings about the phenomenon of effective school library media specialist
leadership. Chapter 4 addresses the four guiding research questions of the study: