Return to the June 1996 Table of ContentsBy Emily Sachar
Emily Sachar, a freelance writer and adjunct professor at Columbia University, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Try as they might to keep up--with new books, new software, and now the explosion of the Internet--the nation's school library media centers are facing a daunting future. "The issue for the next millennium will be: How far can you stretch beyond your walls?" says Pam Spencer, coordinator of library services for the 143,000-student Fairfax County, Va., public school system, which has been among the most aggressive in the nation in upgrading library media centers. "How do you bring to your students the vast array of knowledge available outside the room they can see? Your access points will be far more important than the number of books in your collection."
Fairfax County is among hundreds of U.S. school districts embracing the technological revolution through enhancements to the library media center. Programs in these districts include the obvious upgrades--automating circulation and card-catalog functions; replacing slow, monochrome computers with speedy, graphics-savvy machines; adding CD-ROM drives to library computers; and hooking into the Internet. But their programs go far beyond a fancy show of hardware and software or an upgrade of the computer lab.
These districts--often with limited resources--are handing students tools to become information-literate and creating facilities where students actually learn how to learn. They are converting their traditional, paper-dependent libraries--with their card catalogs, student-signed check-out cards, and walls and walls of books--into technology-rich information centers with tendrils into local public and university libraries, as well as the vast resources of the Internet.
But the conversion can be fraught with headaches. Libraries must sometimes shut down while books are labeled with bar-code strips. Library media specialists must learn the content of individual CD-ROMs and the capabilities of the Internet so they can guide students to useful applications. Curricula must be rewritten to take advantage of the new resources. Sometimes, even the layout of a school must be redesigned for better access to the media center. And extensive and ongoing staff retooling is necessary to make sure teachers are comfortable with the new media. Students, too, need to learn to discriminate among the voluminous amounts of information generated by simple search requests. And library media specialists are faced with an infuriating array of choices--not the least of which is whether to spend their budgets on technology or on books.
"The cost of these systems can be overwhelming," says Marilyn Miller, emeritus professor and retired chair of the Department of Library and Information Studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. "And these systems will do nothing to improve the learning of students if teacher and staff development aren't factored in from the outset." The addition of technical support staff also is essential, Miller says. "What we hear all too often when the motherboard on the computer crashes is, 'Go get the librarian. She'll fix it.' That has to be replaced with the words, 'Go get the technician.' Districts must invest in technical assistants."
Despite the headaches, these conversions are changing the face of library media centers--and changing the way students work. Class assignments can become both more open-ended and more engaging. And as they learn to create their own base of knowledge, rather than passively absorbing material, students are turning to their librarians and teachers as knowledge coaches.
School officials are faced with a dizzying array of choices and vendors once they decide to automate their school libraries and media centers. And the time line for a full-scale automation project varies enormously, depending on fiscal resources. In fact, administrators say, once it begins, the effective library upgrade essentially never ends.
The experience of the Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kan., is not atypical, according to conversion experts like Kieth Wright, Miller's colleague at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. In this 13,500-student, 22-school district, which has a $65 million yearly budget, the media center enhancement process began three years ago with the expenditure of $910,000 to purchase a central computer, 225 "dumb" terminals, 55 printers, and a service agreement. The system required upgrades of $50,000 the second year and $150,000 the third year. In addition, the district hired a full-time specialist in library automation systems (salary range, $30,000-$50,000, plus benefits and overhead). And, says Deputy Superintendent Steve McIlvain, the district is now spending $80,000 a year for maintenance expenses, both in-house and contractual. In addition, he says, new hardware and software purchases to keep pace with progress cost from $130,000 to $180,000 a year.
McIlvain says the rapidly growing district, which plans to build between four and six schools in the next few years, is planning a comprehensive new technology plan that will require replacing much of the equipment the district recently bought. "We're talking now about networking the whole district and going out into the rest of the world," McIlvain says. That will mean most of the roughly 250 dumb terminals students now use to access the millions of volumes in local public and community college libraries will be replaced with "smart," stand-alone PC-type computers. Each of these smart terminals will be loaded with word processing and other software students can use to manipulate the information they obtain from library searches. The $625,000 cost of this upgrade will be spread over three years, McIlvain says.
Still, for virtually all districts, the upgrades in a school or district library media center should follow a simple, linear plan, advises Wright, who is also the author of The Challenge of Technology: Action Strategies for the School Library Media Specialist (American Library Association, 1993). His advice:
* Put a telephone in the media center. It sounds so obvious, Wright says, that many districts overlook it. But a phone--connected to a facsimile machine--is the media specialist's link to the outside world.
* Automate circulation. This first step in automating the library eliminates the dependence on an index-card type of filing system in which a librarian must retrieve cards from a pile to know when they are overdue. With automated circulation, every book and every patron's library or student-identification card receive a bar code; books are checked out and in using a hand-held scanning device. Automated circulation simplifies inventory control and lets the media specialist generate overdue reports as well as detailed data on the types of books that are most heavily used--valuable information when it comes to planning new book purchases. Another benefit: The media specialist can tell each student, at the end of the year, which books he or she has checked out or suggest new titles by favorite authors.
* Automate the card catalog. This step, which often occurs in tandem with bar-coding, lets students hunt for books by title, author, subject, or even key words, tapping into the often-detailed "notes" field entry for each book. Most libraries automating now are using a standardized format--the MARC record, or machine-readable record--to input the catalog information. Automating the card catalog also makes child's play of spelling. Students can type in just a few letters of a subject, and the computer will find it; it can even be trained to forgive an occasional error. In old-fashioned paper catalogs, in contrast, students needed to spell out six or seven letters in a word to find suitable titles.
* Set up a local-area network. Any school that plans more than a single workstation to look up books in the media center must set up a LAN, which entails installing a file server with peripheral workstations. Students in the same room at different terminals or in classrooms outside the library can then simultaneously access the card catalog and any other information or software that has been downloaded into the server. Another benefit: A school need not maintain multiple copies of a single software program. Instead, the program is downloaded or installed once and, with appropriate licensing, is then accessible to all. Prices for LANs vary enormously, depending on the size of the server and the number of peripherals attached. The simplest sort of system, with a small server and, say, four machines, might cost as little as $10,000, while a system with dozens of terminals and a powerful server can cost more than $150,000.
* Install a CD-ROM tower in the media center. Such a device--which will cost roughly $5,000 to $7,000 and might handle as many as 10 discs at a time--is far more useful than a CD-changer "juke box." A tower, hooked to a network, allows students and teachers to access the CD collection simultaneously from different points in the school. Not only can different CDs be tapped at the same time, but a single CD can be accessed at precisely the same time by as many as 10 people. Individual laser beams inside the tower make possible this multiple access. But be careful to purchase so-called networked CDs, which are meant to work in a tower.
* Connect to the outside world. The simplest way is to install a modem to allow access to the Internet and an electronic-mail system. An easy application: setting up an electronic penpal system within the district. Wright advises initially setting up just one or two phone lines into the media center and having the file server manage the receipt and sending of e-mail messages. But many library media specialists are finding that an Internet connection with only one access point is too limiting for instructional use. New phone technology, such as T1 and ISDN connections, now permits the splitting of a signal to allow multiple Internet connections from a single phone line. Often, free Internet connections can be established by allying with a local university.
* Hook to an electronic "union" card catalog or join a wide-area network. Internet access will generate a host of information sources, but the only way to access the physical volumes of another library--whether it's another library in your school district, the local public library, or a university facility--is to tap into those libraries' catalogs. A union catalog allows you to search the entire collection at one time, while the wide-area network requires searches of individual databases. Finding publications is one thing; getting them is another. Document delivery is still an unsolved problem for many districts, Wright notes. "In terms of journal articles, lots of people will fax you a copy now. But if you want a book, we're still talking about waiting two weeks," he says. Careful districts work closely from the outset with the libraries with which they hope to share resources. That way, machinery can be both compatible and ample, and goals can be clarified early.
Still, even districts that are achieving quick success with their automation projects point to troubling junctures along the way. In Fairfax County, the most pressing issue administrators faced five years ago was how to integrate three unique computer systems that had been purchased over the course of a decade. Ultimately, district leaders decided to start anew, purchasing the same system as that used by the local public library to allow for maximum integration. But the speed of the revolution in Fairfax County has turned up dinosaurs--286-chip personal computers that are too slow to run the newer software to which the district is committed.
And just last year, a budget crunch threatened the jobs of 23 newly created technology training specialists, each of whom handles staff training at a single high school and the middle schools and elementary schools that "feed" it. Ultimately, nearly $1 million was found to save the specialists' jobs, but not before a lengthy debate on the value of multimedia versus the late bus for sports teams and myriad other line items.
Meanwhile, Oak Hill Elementary School in Overland Park, Kan., faced an architectural decision--how to make the computer lab accessible to the library. The school decided to locate a new eight-station Internet Lab adjacent to the library and to move the computer lab, too, so it opened into the library. "You may have to be willing to have labs in storerooms and to surrender work space to make it all fit," says Sharon Coatney, Oak Hill's library media specialist. "But it's worth it."
For other districts, money is the incessant obstacle. Take Pineville, Ky. (population 2,100), home to a two-school, 625-student district 90 minutes from Knoxville. Before Pineville Superintendent Diana Schott Lincks could even begin to contemplate technology, she determined she had to put her library's book collections in order. An inventory of the high school facility turned up hundreds of volumes from the 1890s. Some talked of the relaxing effects of smoking, others of government dreams that the United States would one day land a man on the moon.
"We saw that and we said, 'Heck, the interstate highway passed us by; we're sure not going to let the information highway pass us by, too,'" says Lincks. The district began a fundraising campaign two years ago to raise money from alumnae and grants. In 1995, the $100,000 conversion began. It's a small system; the computer terminals are not networked; circulation functions have not yet been automated; and there is no CD-ROM tower. Still, the district has been able to toss out the old Readers' Guides because students can use CD-ROMs, updated monthly, for the same information. And now that a distance-learning facility has been added, two students who wanted to take physics were finally able to do so last year. So determined is Lincks to offer technological opportunities to her students, 70 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, that she invites them to her office, which houses a computer with one of the district's few Internet connections.
But the real challenge of automating library media centers is that you never catch up with progress. "If you have the attitude that you're determined to keep up with the Joneses, you'll feel incessant frustration," says Wright. "School administrators must accept that what they buy today is already obsolete."
Purchasing, too, must become more efficient than in years past, library media specialists say--partly because the sheer volume of books has skyrocketed, and partly because of the increasing competition between books and multimedia titles. Indeed, School Library Journal recently reported that in 1993-94, for the first time ever, books no longer represented the majority of library media center expenditures. That year, the magazine reported, school libraries spent a median of $6,790 on items other than books and $5,000 on books. After all, why should you buy, say, a print version of the World Almanac when the same information is available, instantly updated, on the Internet at less cost? But for school librarians just beginning the automation process, such decisions can be difficult.
"We hope the technology will make us smarter," concludes the University of North Carolina's Miller. "It surely will also make us a bit more crazy."
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