Nueva School Library Home Page

Staff -- School Library Journal, 1/1/1998

January's Web Site of the Month is the Nueva School Library Home Page, managed by School Librarian Debbie Abilock in Hillsborough, CA. Abilock has been extremely active in facilitating technology in both the library and the school, an independent pre-K through eighth-grade school of, in her words, "310 gifted and talented students." Her interest in using technology in new ways prompted me to select her site this month.

The January 1998 issue of Yahoo Internet Life spotlights Abilock's site for its research paper help and the help she gives is more interactive than most. If you go to her Research Page, her "MLA Bibliographic Format Interactive Forms" let you type in bibliographic information for an item. Click on a button and the form delivers to your screen a bibliographic citation for a book, article, or Web site that can be copied and pasted into research papers.

Her most impressive creation, however, may be her search engine page, with its table of types of searches, such as "Web pages from a geographic region" or "information on an event (I know the date)." Students can choose a type of search, click on a link, and go to the appropriate search tool. She includes a large number of them, including search engines like Hotbot and metaengines like Inference Find.

Abilock created the tools "to provide help when human librarians aren't available" and is pleased they've been so well received. While she designed them for her students, universities, businesses, and medical offices are linked to them as well.