Web Site of the Month: Sackets Harbor (NY) Central School

Sackets Harbor (NY) Central School Library
www.nc3r.org/shcsimc

Carole L. Ashbridge (ashbridg@northnet.org), library media specialist at Sackets Harbor (NY) Central School, built her school library's first Web page in 1998. She had discovered that simply bookmarking good sites wasn't going to cut it. She needed to organize all those bookmarked sites into a resource that every student and teacher in the school could access from school or home. The result is the SHCS Library Web page, which provides a long list of sites recommended for school assignments.

A small school: Sackets Harbor is a small K–12 school on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, with only about 100 students and a small faculty. Ashbridge and a part-time assistant must serve a wide range of ages and needs. "Since our staff is so small, I am usually aware of what kinds of things are being done in the classroom," Ashbridge says. "When teachers begin to work on a project I will gather links for them and put them on the page." Ashbridge does all the maintenance and updating of the library site herself, and on her own time. "I don't have time [at work] to do anything, so it is a project for nights, weekends, vacations and the summer," she says.

An impressive collection: On the site, Ashbridge wisely features the library's subscription services and reference materials, such as World Book Online and SIRS Discoverer, before listing the recommended sites on the free Web. "I hope that the kids will see links to quality information first," Ashbridge says. Next on the home page, under "Curriculum Resource Links," is a table of click-on icons that take students to lists of librarian-reviewed links, alphabetized and broken down by subject.

Not just Jeeves: "It troubles me that many times students will settle for the first hit in an Ask Jeeves search," she says. Ashbridge uses the links collection to teach students how to locate good quality Web sites. What's next? Posting book reviews and recommendations. "We have our academic links—now I would like to provide an arena for reading for the fun of it."