Philadelphia Unveils School 'Cybrary’
RSSA $5.4 million state-of-the-art media center wows the City of Brotherly Love
By Eric Oatman -- School Library Journal, 07/01/2005
Students returning this fall to Philadelphia’s academically elite, ethnically diverse Central High School will be welcomed by the city’s first “cybrarian,” Tina Weinraub. Weinraub runs what may be the nation’s most opulent school media center, a $5.4 million state-of-the-art facility paid for entirely by loyal Central alumni. “It’s like heaven,” she says.
The two-story, three-level pleasure dome for young scholars opened on May 24. Its name may be the longest ever for a media center: the Dr. William M. King Communications, Media, and Research Center at the Barnwell Library. Barnwell boasts 70 desktop computers, 70 wireless laptops, seven wireless printers, and cherrywood shelves for 37,000 books. Computers in a room set aside for advanced research are wired to specialized databases. A room for college catalogues and interviews sits off the main reading room, as do a trophy room, a workroom for teachers, and a conference center that can hold up to 150 people. Memorabilia going back to 1838, the year of the school’s founding, is stowed in an alumni archives room. Central is the nation’s second-oldest public high school.
The alums couldn’t be prouder of their achievement. “The students who go here now are the best of the best,” says Harvey Steinberg, a 1959 graduate who heads the construction committee, “and they deserve the best of the best.”
As far as Apple Computer is concerned, they’ve got it. Apple supplied the hardware at bargain prices and dubbed Barnwell a national demonstration site for library technology. In late June, the hi-tech wonderland was a featured stop for attendees of the National Education Computer Conference.
What’s ahead for Barnwell? “It’s always going to be a work in progress, as all libraries are,” says Weinraub, a 20-year veteran of Philadelphia schools. “As a librarian, I have to form a partnership with teachers to help them develop a structure that is more technology-oriented. Textbooks are not real world. Technology gets students into the real world.”
“We love this institution,” says Steinberg. “Most of our alumni feel that the school was the most important educational event in our lives.” Thanks in part to their munificence, thousands of future graduates should feel the same way.
To view the library, visit home page.mac.com/mickw/work/iMovieTheater115.html.
