Web Site of the Month: University Laboratory High School Library

Frances Jacobson Harris (francey@uiuc.edu), who directs the media center at the University Laboratory High School in Urbana, IL, is one of our nation's most progressive school librarians. Her desire to encourage students to evaluate information sources is shown clearly on her library's home page. The page features tools—such as the library's catalog and subscription databases—that students, teachers, and parents often overlook.

Zippy Scenarios: Harris says that almost everyone in the school community, which is part of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), uses the site. Teachers and students use its guides to bibliographic citations, and educators nationwide often visit the "Zippy Scenarios for Teaching Internet Ethics" page, at www.uni.uiuc.edu/library/computerlit/scenarios.html. The site also includes a popular "Book Chat" discussion board.

Roll Over: The home page makes good use of Javascript rollovers, which reveal annotations when visitors move their cursors over a database's name. "It's a great way to communicate the content of a resource without cluttering the screen with lots of text that won't get read," says Harris.