Small Town, Amazing Library
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 10/1/2001
A small-town high school in Hermitage, PA, now has a state-of-the-art library with features available nowhere else. The centerpiece of Hickory High School's new William A. and Sara Doolin Jones Library is its "CyberBridge," a shiny platform running the length of the room. "It's based on the bridge on [Star Trek's] Starship Enterprise," says Elma Anschutz, Hickory's library media specialist. The CyberBridge, made from the same kind of reflective silver metal used for the tailgates of fire trucks, is lined with study cubicles filled with multimedia PCs and TV monitors on a fiber-optic network.
The resources in these cubicles range far beyond those available to students in most high schools. They include database and reference resources, such as Jones Knowledge's e-global library, EBSCOhost, Gale's Contemporary Authors, and the Accunet/AP Multimedia Archive. The library also features an "information wall," allowing any student's or instructor's screen to be projected to the entire group. Classes can also be broadcast throughout the 840-student school. There's also a distance-learning room with videoconferencing facilities. And Anschutz is making arrangements for French classes to meet their French-speaking e-mail pals over a video connection, and for professors from nearby Penn State to lecture to science classes. "I feel like Pooh every day I come to work," she says, "with my nose in a jar of honey."
The new library is the gift of telecommunications entrepreneur Glenn Jones, president of Hickory High School's class of 1948. He'd always regretted that his class's gift to the school—a footbridge between the school and a nearby snack shop—had never been completed. So when Jones, now president and CEO of Jones Knowledge, decided to remodel Hickory High's library in honor of his late brother and his brother's wife, he imagined a library with a CyberBridge. The new library opened to great fanfare on August 28. The library's Web site is at loretta.jonesdirect.com/Hickory.
