Journey to the Library

What is 5000 years old, and speaks through clay, leather, papyrus, stone, paper and ether? What has been build, destroyed, rebuilt, and stolen from purged, censored, rebuilt and discarded. Sennacherib had one, Ptolemy stole to get one and Amazon.com is replacing them.


This was the topic that I feared the most, as I knew virtually nothing about the virtual libraries. Our school has no library, neither real nor virtual. My experience with virtual libraries is limited to using the Uof A libraries’ education journal databases and I do not venture beyond those familiar paths. I hate getting lost…

This journey of discovery is link to a 5000-year-old journey but with newly blazed alternative routes.

I started by going to Wikipedia to map out what virtual libraries are. From there I trekked to the U of A libraries to see what the issues are concerning schools and virtual libraries. Once I got the lay of the land, I ran over to Google to survey the land for the non-educational issues of virtual libraries. Keeping an eye on the clock, I took a narrow fork to libraries and education. I found a summary which explains in very practical terms how a teacher might use a virtual library.

I began to understand some of the Web 2.0 tools from meandering down the halls of the New York City Library.

I stepped into the controversy of the politics of the brick libraries that are being shut down in many American towns. Go Ray Bradbury!

I circled around the challenge to libraries that the mega search engines like Google present as they are becoming more and more specialized data seekers. Then I doubled back to examine actual virtual library sites including the libraries that Jennifer had posted on our class website.

The Virtues of Virtual: Implications for Education

Since I am a novice, I am the perfect candidate for being “sold” on the virtues of virtual. After reading Jennifer Hillner’s (2009) article in and Holly Gunn’s paper (2002)
and Jeff Utecht’s blog I understood the following benefits of virtual school libraries:

• Convenience: open 24/7= anytime learning
• Current: information and resources can be made available quickly, updates too
• Appeal: tech-happy students, multiple learning styles and abilities, provide adaptations for people with visual or auditory difficulties,
• One stop shopping for educators: You are searching for information on global warning for example, and one search could bring up articles, a postcard, a book, a sound clip, a poster, and a video.
• Support: for online courses, virtual schools, outreach schools
• Customization: libraries can be designed for a school a course a class or for yourself. Super customization: curriculum files can be created that augment a topic within a course. This school-produced file could include student work, photographs, local histories, recordings or art, for example. This file could help student researchers from becoming overwhelmed by too many resources.
• Individualized: student-directed, constructivist learning in supported in this customization.
• Collaboration: students, and their teachers and librarians can meet synchronously or asynchronously.
• Help: instruction, tutorials, reference services, or assistance by email or in real-time
• Fame: users can become both readers as well as authors, publishers and contributors to the library collections.
• Future: virtual school libraries are changing the nature of learning at the school.
• Friendly: supports a global network of learners
• Fancy: marketing tool for the school
• Finally: “Virtual libraries have the ability to transform the relationship between learners and resources, facilitating both formal and informal learning. With careful design and the support of skilled information professionals, virtual libraries can provide powerful environment for student learning.” (Gunn, 2002)

Implications: Concerns about Virtual Libraries and Student Learning



• Connection: Users need to have Internet connection: obvious but more common than you would think
• Skills: Hargattai (2002) described the second-level digital as users who had Internet, but lacked the skills to use it
• Help: Uteck, (2007) found that guidance for students is needed more now than ever in how to search multiple databases, and to organize, assess, and synthesize information that is harvested. Here the teacher librarian’ role becomes critical.
• More help: Discrimination and evaluation skills need to be taught to kids: creating and using information.
• Deciphering: Students need guidance: for example how do they separate quality information form an EBSCOHost mix for example, of journals and junky mags?
• $torage: maintaining data on ever changing formats, can be costly and some digitally created sources may become unreadable down the road
• Current: keeping up the bulletin boards, daytimers, blogs and timely bits must consume a lot of energy. There is nothing smellier than stale news and links.
• Trojan horses: Companies offerings freebies...in exchange for what? “Some libraries have even called for video submissions that they ultimately post on YouTube, e.g., through the Gale-sponsored "I Love My Library" contest. “ (Jeske, 2008)
• Sense of Place and Comfort: Where are the big pillows to curl up with that good book?

Knock, knock…Next, my journey took me to some actual virtual school libraries.
The virtual school library’s webpage is the “second door” to the library, so let’s go on in!

You get an immediate first impression of how welcoming the library is or isn’t. For example, Springfield High School Library, the Disneyland of libraries is colourful and welcoming with enough links to keep you interested and interactive until the library closes! Oh, but wait…right it never closes and this is a site I would pick to be on if I was stranded in a cabin during a 3 day blizzard or an extended delay at the airport.

The Bessie Chin Library by contrast, seems cold and unfriendly with too much tiny print and no graphics. Also their scrolling daytimer was out of date! BORING. Then closer to home, Harry Ainlay’s front door looked no different from most school’s website.

Finally, the Birch Lane School Library is a straightforward uncluttered-looking site and would be a comfortable “entry-level” model if I were to attempt to construct a site for my school. No bells and whistles, but easy on the feet while travelling here.

After visiting these libraries and then reading Linda Morgan’s essay on virtual libraries (2008), there appears to be some common elements in effective virtual school libraries websites.

I need to sit down and rest a bit so here they are:

• General “all about the library” brochure information

• Introduction/welcome from the librarians: personal connection

• Pre-selected helpful internet sites

• Library online catalogue

• Magazines/newspapers/publications/rack

• Bulletin board for upcoming school and community events and news

• Theme displays: authors, events, seasons, student and staff work

• Homework help

• The teacher librarian NING deserves its own line, as this is a mega social space for librarians and educators to share ideas. It seems to be the hot place to hang out with photos, videos, blogs, forums, events, and groups. You can test drive fancy new library products to make your site appealing and ever greening! I honestly don’t know how Joyce has a life. She is also the guru of Springfield High Library.

Girl…it’s summer and you are responding to postings!!!

And to keep it local, here is the Alberta School Libraries Ning but I had to sign in first, so that defeated me. NOW I’M HUNGRY.


All of these features use Web 2.0 tools to connect patrons and staff and the world. These include collaboration sites of wikis, blogs, instructional videos and podcasts for starters.

I liked Jeske’s list of good examples:

LINK LIST

• Boulder PL Teen Webcasts

• NYPL Audio and Video Archive

• New York Times Video

• Orange County PL Virtual Library

• PL of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County LibraryLoft

• Sunnyvale PL Podcasts

• Edmonton PL YouTube Channel*

*Note the Edmonton Public Library site. EPL has taken advantage of YouTube's services by posting videos of puppet shows, for example, for its patrons-and anyone else. Also patron book reviews are interesting. This article from The Library Journal explains what is possible and how!

So my journey to discover virtual libraries started in Mesopotamia and ended in Edmonton. The shift from print to digital libraries is yet another marker on the winding road of the library’s adaptability, not unlike that of the shift from tablet to papyrus or hand written manuscripts to print. But what seems different this time is, as John Blyberg of the Darien Library, CT, noted recently, “enterprising libraries… are hoping to redefine their role "as not just the content provider but also the content creator" “ (Jeske, 2008).


Epilogue
As Julius Caesar may have sadly while watched the Library of Alexandria burned down, so mused Petroski, (2008) in reflecting on the closing of his university’s engineering library:

As we all know, for some time now, journals, serials, and even books have been becoming increasingly available in electronic form, which is the principal reason that the bricks-and-mortar library has become dispensable…

Some laptop computers are called notebooks, but "notebook" connotes a work in progress, not a finished treatise that ties the notes together into a coherent whole. Without real books, there may not be real thought. And even entrepreneurs and commercializers are likely to be more successful if they are bound by the rigors of thoughtful composition. The books have been moved. Will they also be forgotten?

References

Gunn, H. (2002). “Virtual Libraries Supporting Student Learning”.
Retreived July 21, 2009, from
http://www.accesswave.ca/~hgunn/special/papers/virlib/index.html

Hargattai, E. (2002). Second-level digital divide: differences in people's
online skills. First Monday. 7 (4). Retrieved July 21, 2009,
from http://www.eszter.com/research/

Jesse, M. (2008). Tapping Into Media. Library Journal, 133(15), 22. Retrieved July 21, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1556790111).

Morgan, L. (2008). VLTs: Virtual Libraries for Teachers. The Alberta Teachers’ Association:
Alberta. Volume 1, Number 1, 2008 p. 26 Retreived July 22, 2009, from http://aslc.teachers.ab.ca/Pages/Welcome.aspx

Petroski, H. (2008). Moving the books. ASEE Prism, 18(1), 29. Retrieved July 21, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1559405701).

Uteck, J. (2007) Blog entry, June 26, 2007 Retrieved July 21, 2009, from http://www.thethinkingstick.com/classrooms-and-libraries-for-the-net-generation/comment-page-1#comment-24716

http://schoollibrarywebsites.wikispaces.com/Some+models+of+effective+practice