The Librain

We can all get depressed about the Google generation and headteachers who think that libraries are obsolete -

Cheer yourself up by reading this article:

33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important by Will Sherman on the DegreeTutor site.

How many school librarians run their school websites - I mean the official ones rather than their own library site? I am starting to look at ours with a view to revising and re-organising it.

So, what is the best way to use a school site? In England, we are now expected to develop learning platforms/VLEs. These will give students a flavour of the social networking sites that they inhabit, but with the control of adults. There are interesting from the school librarian’s point of view and many of us are beginning to use them to work beyond the walls of our libraries. I am wondering if we might feel a little constrained by these in the way that we want to develop our use of Web 2.0 technologies. Already, many of the filtering systems used by our schools block many useful sites - especially blogging.

Anyway, back to the school official site. Schools use these for many purposes. We are going to think about developing ours mainly as a marketing tool and using the VLE for the rest. It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop.

During a sleepless night recently, I began to think about how much time I spend writing my two websites, Strongest Links and LRC Online. I have spent ages trying to design useful sites which flow easily with the best appearance that I can manage with my limited ability. But is this kind of thing necessary any more?

I have a growing list of Del.icio.us tagged websites. Why not just add a link to these rather than labour to make finely honed Pathfinders? I talked about this with Jan Radford, who does this on her site and I will now begin to think about this a bit further.

The other thing is that it is so easy and quick to edit this blog, but I have to go through a long process to edit my LRC site - LRC Online.  I can edit this at school or at home, but I have to then upload it at home because of restrictions on our school network. yet, I can add my thoughts to this blog in a moment.

Shall consider this more…

At the moment, I am in the middle of Year 7 Inductions. We take a whole morning (3 lessons of an hour each) to cover a general orientation, how to find and choose fiction and how to find information (including Dewey). We do use some modern methods - e.g. a whiteboard and music, but generally the sessions are largely unchanged from the kind of thing that I used to do years ago.

But the children love them!