Coming Soon to ... a School Near You
RSSStaff -- School Library Journal, 02/01/2000
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Fredericka's tendency to drive from one corner of the state to the other with a cell phone glued to one ear greatly concerns her mother, but as director of the statewide school library network INFOhio, she's on the road a lot. There are libraries to visit, education officials to win over, discounts to coax out of vendors. Fredericka, a dark-haired, soft-spoken woman in her 40s, with a wardrobe of stylish glasses, often lives out of the trunk of her 1994 Nissan, drinking bottled water from a case stored there and dining on sandwiches picked up at drive-through windows. "I don't think I'm going to rest until everyone has a good school library," she insists.
Fredericka's energy is in stark contrast to the day's gloomy weather, a blessing since she'll need it to complete the massive project she's taken on--to tie together Ohio's public and private school libraries--all 4,679 of them--in a single online network.
This 10-year-long effort has put Ohio at the forefront of school library networks nationwide. A large and growing number of states offer electronic resources on a statewide basis, but few states have networked school library automation systems or created a school library union catalog the way INFOhio has.
While the network environment here is clearly healthy--this was, after all, the birthplace of OCLC in 1967--Ohio has made the funding of academic and public library networks a priority. INFOhio, with its focus on school libraries, is the sad sister of the bunch. The project's limited state funding is meted out from a statewide computer network deep within Ohio's Department of Education (ODE), but some at INFOhio question whether the top ODE officials are indeed aware of them--or if ODE knows it's funding a project that's ahead of other efforts nationwide. ODE "doesn't know they're doing it," says Greg Byerly, a longtime INFOhio consultant and associate professor at Kent State University's School of Library and Information Science, of INFOhio's efforts, "but they're doing it."
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GREG BYERLY, Associate Professor at Kent State University's School of Library Information Science |
The fact that Fredericka--Terri to coworkers and friends--has been able to bring INFOhio as far as she has is a testament to her powers of persuasion. To hear her colleagues tell it, she's dedicated, energetic, relentless. "Terri's been very successful lobbying for electronic resources," says Darlene Basone, chair of Cincinnati Public Schools' Librarians Curriculum Council. "People at the state level know her. She's provided leadership; she's not just a figurehead."
Fredericka's philosophy? "We just never give up."
That same determination drives the core group of people who are helping Fredericka build INFOhio, which includes nearly a dozen staff members and consultants, a 19-member steering committee, 30 task force members, and even more technical support people. "They're all obsessed, working toward this great goal," says Fredericka. One former superintendent who has worked closely with them has been known to say, "I love these people, but they never go away."
That's the gracious way to put it. They've also been called pit bulls.
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f the word "determined" describes the INFOhio team, so does "ambitious." Its goals are well defined: provide all of Ohio's elementary- and secondary-school students with the online resources they need. And share, via schools using a single automation system and a union catalog, all the resources that are offline. Throw in training that enables librarians and teachers to use INFOhio's resources and you have the essence of the project."What we're trying to do is to build a school library for the state," says Fredericka. "We're doing traditional library services in a new way. It's not anything lofty. It's just so simple." Simple, perhaps, but not simplistic. "The idea of linking school libraries statewide is a fairly radical vision," says Joe Bonwich, a former Data Research Associate executive. "And [INFOhio] pulled it off."
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What INFOhio Has |
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A STRONG STATEWIDE BACKBONE OF TECHNICAL SITES UNIFIED AUTOMATION SYSTEM A SUPPORTIVE LIBRARY COMMUNITY A ONE-MILLION-ITEM CATALOG MEDIA BOOKING ON THE WEB TRAINING FOR LIBRARIANS AND TEACHERS |
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lectronic resources are currently INFOhio's most popular service. Through a pilot project, for example, students in rural Massillon, OH, have discovered the online Oxford English Dictionary. "My kids never even knew what the OED was before," says Karen Nielsen, an English teacher at Tuslaw Junior-Senior High School, whose modest library spends some $4,500 on materials each year, well below the national average. Nielsen used the OED in a lesson that wove together the Canterbury Tales, the seven deadly sins, and Paul Fleischman's novel Whirligig, in which a high school boy kills a teen girl in a car accident and, as penance, builds whirligigs as requested by the girl's mother. "From the OED, I found out that whirligigs had been used as punishment," says Nielsen, referring to a medieval practice that punished petty offenders by putting them into a cage hung from a tree--a whirligig--and spinning it at high speed. "That was really an eye-opener for me," says Nielsen. In Tuslaw's thinly stocked library, her students have come to rely on INFOhio resources. "I have kids who don't have to leave this room to do serious research."Thanks to INFOhio, nearly 2.1 million students in Ohio's public and private schools now have online access in libraries and classrooms to Encyclopaedia Britannica, a customized version of Bell + Howell's ProQuest Direct with 144 periodicals, and SIRS Discoverer--at no cost to individual schools. "I wouldn't have the resources I have without there being funding for INFOhio," says a librarian in a small school district.
Statewide buys are also bringing Ohio's school libraries closer to OPLIN, the state's 250-member public library network. The two networks split the tab for the Britannica and hope to share costs for other resources in the future. Byerly estimates that the joint contract saved schools $1 million over what they would have spent had schools purchased access on an individual basis.
The sharing of electronic resources also helps Ohio put a Band-Aid on libraries underfunded as a result of site-based management, a practice in which a school-based team allocates funding, free from most district requirements. George Tombaugh, executive assistant to the governor for education, is concerned about this disparity in library dollars. "My interest [in shared electronic resources] is providing equity for all students," he explains. "Sometimes the libraries aren't funded if money flows into the general operating budget for a school district. The money goes for something else." With statewide licenses for resources, the thinking was that "we could do it more cost effectively and make sure everybody has the same resources," says Tombaugh.
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What INFOhio Needs |
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$25 MILLION EQUITABLE ANNUAL STATE FUNDING MORE ELECTRONIC RESOURCES INFOhio Director Theresa Fredericka. She envisions expanding offerings to a full core collection. STATE MANDATE FOR LIBRARY MEDIA SPECIALISTS to have impact in schools without professionals. MORE TEACHERS AS CHAMPIONS UP-TO-DATE COMPUTER HARDWARE |
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small but growing number of schools buy their automation services through INFOhio. Of the more than 4,600 public and private schools in the state, INFOhio supplies some 900 with DRA's MultiLIS online catalog/circulation system. Of those 900 schools, the majority--678--have their catalogs on the Web. The annual costs generally range from $1 to $3 per student, depending on the school's technical support site. Some sites also charge hardware and telecommunications fees.Still, such advanced technology doesn't erase the fact that many Ohio school libraries are still saddled with card catalogs. "Most of the schools not [on INFOhio's DRA system] are not automated," says Byerly. That means schools in the state still use--and teach--a system introduced early in the 20th century. The contrast is even more alarming considering that once these same students reach the state's universities and colleges, they'll slam into OhioLINK, the Buckeye State's well-funded network of some 60 college and university libraries, which is advanced enough to concentrate on developing collections of digitized images, audio, and video.
Even in these straits, the lure of being part of one big system that uses the same automation vendor isn't pulling everyone in. Use of INFOhio's DRA system, for example, is patchy in urban districts, although that may change over time. Its largest district to date, Dayton, just came on board to automate the first 12 of its 65 schools. But Cleveland, the state's largest school district with nearly 75,000 students, went in a different direction. It recently decided to automate its libraries with Follett Circulation Plus instead of DRA. "We felt strongly that INFOhio and DRA would not have been able to handle a district our size," says Vivian Melton, director of library media services for the Cleveland Municipal School District. After looking at a handful of systems, a committee of library media specialists and technology staff in the district decided that "Follett won out" for its online catalog and circulation system, as well as its textbook component, explains Melton. Would Cleveland have chosen DRA had the state--through INFOhio--picked up the bill? "That probably would have been a major factor [in making the decision]. Money always helps," she says. Still, Melton expects that even under those circumstances, her district probably would have chosen Follett.
A small number--22 out of 77--of Cincinnati's schools also use Follett, some since 1987, says the district's de facto library coordinator Basone. "I don't see dumping it and coming up with money to buy something else," she says, expressing a preference for what she describes as Follett's user-friendliness. If "our schools could get [the INFOhio DRA system] for free, you've got to evaluate that," says Basone.
Another large district, Columbus, is "at this point, up in the air," says Brenda González, supervisor of instructional information services for the district's 144 schools. The district, which put out a bid for an automation vendor in December, expected to choose one this winter and would consider INFOhio if it responds to the request for proposals, says González.
Other urban districts would gladly automate through INFOhio if they had the cash, says Fredericka. "Toledo loved it, but they can't afford it," she says, "and Akron's been trying to get the money." If the state makes funding available, Byerly expects the majority of urban districts would join INFOhio.
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NFOhio, a grassroots effort, got its start in a living room about 10 years ago. Realizing that serious money was being poured into the state's academic library network, a small group of library media specialists in northeastern Ohio started to plan their strategy for a K-12 network. Not surprisingly, the chair of the group was Fredericka, who, at that point, was district library coordinator at the Lakewood City (OH) Schools.|
GEORGE TOMBAUGH, Executive Assistant to the Governor of Ohio for Education |
They knew it wasn't going to be easy. At an early meeting on a day when the temperature dipped to 22 below zero, one librarian said, presciently, "This isn't going to happen overnight." Fredericka and the group, the Lakeshore Northeast Ohio Computer Association (LNOCA), headed by Director Don Mayle, started by coaxing an education foundation in the state to give them a $7,500 grant and headed straight to the networking pioneers--Ohio's academic libraries. That's where they bought the consulting services of the talented and amiable Byerly, who was then OhioLINK's director of library systems.
In need of cash to build a statewide union catalog, the group joined with ACCESS, a nearby organization working on a parallel automation project, to beat the bushes. When the state's Department of Education "showed absolutely no interest in funding [INFOhio]," the group looked for alternate sources of funding, says Carl Carter, the now-retired library/media consultant at ODE.
While ODE has yet to smother INFOhio with funding, a few years ago the state legislature nudged ODE's computer branch, the Ohio Educational Computing Network, to oversee INFOhio and give it enough funding to hire Fredericka as the project's director in 1996. It has also given her limited, but fairly stable funding; her budget for the last several bienniums has been $3.9 million. (Ohio budgets stretch over two years.) This year, OECN pumped an additional $1 million into her budget for electronic resources. Still, it's a far cry from OPLIN's 2000-2001 budget of approximately $11.5 million and OhioLINK's $14.6 million.0
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ushing up a road this steep calls for ingenuity as well as sheer persistence. Perhaps that explains why INFOhio seeds its arguments in unlikely, but highly effective, places. When the district librarian for the Indian Valley Local Schools, Tom Adamich, needs to have his teeth checked, he puts himself in the chair of his dentist, Dr. Kerry Metzger. Metzger also happens to be a Republican state representative who heads the Ohio House of Representatives' Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee, part of the Finance and Appropriations Committee. "I've talked to him about [INFOhio], about connectivity, about how what we've been able to do [in my region] is an example of what can happen across the state," says Adamich. His dental chair-based lobbying seems to be working. Metzger supports funding electronic resources at the state level and has invited the INFOhio people to testify before his subcommittee, says Fredericka.|
Student INFOhio users from Upper Arlington High School in Columbus, Ohio: (l. to r.) LYNNE SLAWSKY, COLLEEN MCCURDY, NICK SMITH, IRAM QURESHI |
Because Fredericka and INFOhio are part of a competitive, scream-if-you-want-to-be-heard education community, they are dependent on this kind of support from legislators--because it's absent in Ohio's Department of Education. While top education officials, like George Tombaugh and Roger Nehls, Ohio's deputy superintendent of education, both new to their positions in 1999, seem sensitive to the value of library media centers, they backpedal from declaring that they should be a priority. Libraries "compete internally with other tugs and pulls of the educational system in terms of where resources go," says Nehls, noting that there are many other programs, besides INFOhio, competing for the same slice of the fiscal pie.
"It puzzles me that libraries aren't considered essential, with all the state proficiency tests we have," says Ellen Stepanian, director of library media for the Shaker Heights City Schools. "The students need resources and libraries are the place for those resources." As an INFOhio supporter since the beginning, Stepanian believes the project will succeed, due to the group's willingness to talk to legislators. "INFOhio is learning how to lobby for the money. You don't get everything the first year. But you go back and you go back and you go back."
That's what Fredericka will have to keep doing if she's to finish automating the state's library media centers. Her next budget request will include money "for the whole enchilada--$25 million to automate the rest of the [3,200] libraries," she says. A bargain, say the INFOhio people, since, compared to the average $10,000 to $15,000 it costs to automate a school library, INFOhio estimates it can do the same work for $5,500, says Byerly, attributing the cost savings to the scale of the project. If all of the remaining non-INFOhio public schools were to automate on an individual basis, Byerly estimates that it could end up costing as much as $48 million.
As long as the word is still out on whether state education officials and legislators will hand over the cash, Fredericka plans on putting a lot more mileage on her car. Until, that is, the state makes INFOhio the equal of the public and academic networks, a prospect that still gives Fredericka goose bumps. "That's our biggest ace on the table," says Fredericka confidently, imagining a conversation with state officials. "You've done the academic libraries. You've done the publics. Now do the schools."
Renée Olson is editor-in-chief of School Library Journal.
