Baltimore County Automates Its Textbooks

The Baltimore County (MD) School District has always evaluated and ordered its textbooks the old-fashioned way—on paper. In fact, there's so much paperwork that textbook orders take weeks or months to move through the system. Consequently, vendors often wait a long time to get paid. Using paper to order textbooks is standard procedure for most of the nation's school districts, but a few districts are pioneering ways to automate how textbooks are ordered and managed.

Last year, Baltimore County's schools finally decided to enter the digital age, tapping Della Curtis, coordinator of the school district's library information services office, to overhaul its outdated ways. As a result, the district will soon be ordering textbooks online, in a fraction of the time it took previously. Online evaluation forms will replace the curriculum committee's textbook reviews, and order forms will no longer need to move from desk to desk. "I'm looking for a complete solution, start to finish," explains Curtis, who says the 165 schools in the district expect to have a database very much like a library automation system, in which librarians place orders electronically. The new system will also allow all information compiled by the curriculum committee to be accessible to everyone involved in the textbook selection process. That way, all committees can easily analyze existing textbooks and determine the schools' needs.

Going digital not only saves time but money. Curtis estimates that each online order will cost about 13 cents in labor, compared to $35 to $50 to place an order on paper. And vendors get paid immediately. In the long run, the money saved will help the automation system pay for itself. And talk about efficiency—the new database, like a library catalog, will show which classrooms are using which textbooks. "When a school board member would ask how many textbooks the district currently owns, no one could answer him," Curtis says. "In the new system, every textbook will have a bar code and be checked out to schools, so we'll know how many we have."

Baltimore County has asked vendors to make bids for the new automated textbook system, and the district will select a vendor by January 2003. Follett, creator of the school district's library ordering system, is a possible candidate. But vendors like Winnebago and Hayes could also create an alternative system for the district, Curtis says. Follett Educational Services already markets TextLink, a textbook management system, but it lacks the evaluation features that Curtis and her committee badly need.

Curtis proved that she could manage big projects in 2000, when she led a push to boost funding for school library materials. She did the necessary homework and showed the school board how the library materials budgets had shrunk to $1.77 from $10.80 per pupil over a 10-year period. As a result, the board voted to give libraries $10.529 million to boost their collections in 2000, and it continued the funding in 2001 to the tune of $25 per pupil.