Keeping Up with the Googles
We need to be fearless in creating better online libraries
By Brian Kenney, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2006
Like many of you, I bet, I'm neither a Luddite nor a geek, but caught somewhere in the middle. I'm fascinated by technology's rate of change and how it has transformed our lives and our profession over the last few decades. I just wish it would all slow down—at least for six months—so I could catch up and finally set up TiVo, explore del.icio.us, and get a Flickr account.
But mainly I'm exhilarated. After all, I'm old enough to have worked in a library with a periodical collection of 30 titles. That was it. Back then, there was no “online.” When people needed information, they usually required our help. For users, stress didn't come from “information overload,” it came from having to navigate our difficult systems of indexes, abstracts, and catalogs. And once they had tracked down an article, patrons worried that someone would have already torn it out, or that the microfilm reader/printer was busted, or the copy machine didn't take bills. If they had no luck with our miniscule magazine collection, they would be forced to hike across town to the “big library,” where there were 90 titles (including such exotica as Le Monde) and a few more indexes with which they'd likely need our help.
I was thinking about the old information world during a trip I made to Ohio last week. I sat with folks from InfOhio, who, in partnership with SirsiDynix, are training more than 100 school librarians and classroom teachers. The group will spend the summer identifying hundreds of Web sites that correspond to the state's K–12 curriculum. These Web sites will then be integrated into SchoolRooms, a portal from SirsiDynix, where students can easily search across the catalog, databases, and Web content to find the most relevant material for their grade and subject area.
It's an ambitious project and the group was enthusiastic about creating this new resource. But there was also an underlying anxiety: by making it so easy for students to find relevant information, were we handing administrators an argument for eliminating school librarians?
This is hardly a crazy fear—many school librarians already feel under attack. But by making it easier for kids to find relevant information, librarians are only trying to keep media centers in sync with the rest of the online world. Search engines, from Google to Yahoo! (and many in between), are desperately trying to make information gathering faster and easier. Why should children and teens be offered a lesser experience in school libraries? And if our online resources aren't first-rate, how can we expect kids to use them?
Yes, we will always need to teach search skills to some degree. But if technology can succeed in making information seeking largely intuitive, we should rejoice—that's the least important skill we have to teach. It's far more important, as library researcher Ross Todd made clear in these pages earlier this year (“Ross to the Rescue!,” April), for us to focus on what learners need to do with information: evaluate it, analyze it, reconcile different perspectives, and synthesize it into their own understandings.
We know this, but the world doesn't. That's why our efforts to understand, capture, and express what school librarians do for learners are more important than ever.
