School Librarian Links
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 11/1/1998
School Librarian Links: The All-in-One Resource Guide for School Librarians and Teachers (SLL) (www.flatlandcenter.com/~cyberian/)is an annotated directory of very useful sites. I've selected it as the SLJ Online Library Web Site of the Month because it has an excellent selection of professional resources and has been a reliable Web gateway since it was created in 1996 -- a long time in Web years.
Kathleen Gentili (kgentil@aztec.asu.edu), Library Media Specialist in the Peoria Unified School District in Glendale, AZ, is the brains behind this site. She created SLL after discovering that the handful of sites geared toward K-12 school librarians were poorly organized. "The general subject guides that did exist at that time were almost never annotated," she told me, "so users like me were often frustrated with spending endless hours surfing for useful sites."
SLL offers 16 basic topic areas -- a lot of material collected under one URL. Among the particularly useful sections are "Acceptable Use Resources" (which includes sample acceptable-use policies for student terminals), "Book and Media Reviews," and "Online Text and News," which provides a selection of free digital archives and trial offers of commercial periodical databases.
Gentili is currently on leave from her job but still maintains the site at her own expense, coding it in HTML by hand rather than using software. "It takes a great deal of time to do a quality site," she said.
--Walter Minkel (wmink@teleport.com), Multnomah County (OR) Library School Corps Technology Trainer.
