Traffic-free Safari

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 11/1/2005

Is your school’s network plagued by heavy bandwidth traffic? A new K–12 video product may ease the congestion.

SAFARI Montage— a free-standing server loaded with more than 1,000 videos—offers schools instant access to programming—from Ken Burn’s The Civil War and Scholastic’s Magic School Bus—without having to download the shows from the Internet, which can clog up a school’s network. Library Video Co. began shipping the product last month, with most of Chicago’s public schools and 25 schools in Indiana among its first customers, says Andrew Schlessinger, the firm’s CEO.

“School librarians have been left out of digital collecting because they’re primarily getting to select [video] titles from one publisher,” Schlessinger says. “But traditionally they get to select books title by title, which this will allow them to do now with their digital collections.”

Currently, SAFARI Montage is available only as a pre-set library of selected titles, but Schlessinger says new catalogs will allow schools to upgrade their collections beyond the core content packages. The package for grades K–8 will cost individual schools $1,000 a year, plus $2,495–$2,795 for the actual server. The just released package for grades 9–12 will cost $1,500 a year per building.

Teachers will be able to screen entire shows for a class on a room monitor or create their own segmented clips. Video can also be incorporated into PowerPoint presentations as long as the materials remain on the network.