Web Site of the Month: North High School Library

North High School Library

www.csd99.k12.il.us/north/library

Few high schools have a Web site as complete and as easy to use as North High School's (NHS). The school, with a student body of about 2,150, is in Downers Grove, IL, an upper middle class suburb of Chicago. Chris Balsano (cbalsano@ csd99.k12.il.us), a librarian at NHS, says she and other library staffers assembled the first version of the page about five years ago as a way to organize their subscription databases. But since then it's grown tremendously, offering students and faculty hundreds of links and resources.

Always something new: "We are into heavy PR," Balsano says; she wants to give students a reason to think of the library daily. The home page changes constantly, with a Site of the Day, an SAT Question of the Day, a Word of the Day, and more (Balsano doesn't change these words and questions herself; she links to sites that do the work). There's a news applet, available from Yahoo, that flashes the current headlines across the bottom of the home page.

Research and reader's advisory: Balsano spent much of this past summer on a labor of love—the NHS Research Guide. Using Web forms generated by FrontPage, students can develop their research topics, evaluate Web resources, and reflect on aspects of their project. If you're wondering why any student would fill out a Web form with "reflections," it's because Balsano is working with faculty members to make these questionnaires a required part of students' research. She's creating another piece of the site—a reader's advisory section in which students write mini-reviews of books in the library's collection. Staff will look at the reviews and attach them to NHS's Follett online catalog. "We'll probably kick this off," Balsano says, "during National Library Week this spring."

Tech tips: The site also includes technology tutorials for creating a PowerPoint presentation, making a table in Word, or evaluating the quality of a Web site. There's another set of tutorials for all of the library's databases on the site under "Online Guides." "Interactivity increases student interest," says Balsano. "As librarians, we can influence these changes though our Web sites."