Dec 10 2007
Missed opportunities or chance to shine?
I have just spent an interesting couple of days on a course. The SLICT (Strategic Leadership of ICT) course is run by the National College for School Leadership and involved senior staff who lead on ICT in their schools (plus me). It felt a bit beyond my “comfort zone” at times, but was very interesting in terms of how we have allowed our skills to become invisible in many schools.
As my job title is rather obscure and does not reveal that I am a librarian, it was fun to see some of the participant’s faces when I told them my background. At first I was worried that I would be out of my depth with all of these senior staff, but then decided that I needed to promote our skills and roles in school. I may have expressed myself rather too forcefully at times, but I felt that I had to put our case.
So, I did make a few comments to the effect that as librarians we have, or could have, a major role in managing information beyond the traditional walls of our libraries. Some of the techies went on about metadata and filenames as if they had just invented the wheel. When I said that many schools already had information experts in post – they were surprised! Or they could have been irritated, of course.
But… many of the teachers there said that their librarians were not interested in developing the ICT side of their libraries. These senior managers saw their libraries as backwaters, places of silence, stuffy, book-based, not at all forward looking. Their librarians, in their eyes, were old-fashioned and stereotypical. Again, when I mentioned
that we are exploring Web 2.0 – they were surprised.
Anyway, we then went on school visits and, believe it or not, the school they sent me to had all-singing all-dancing ICT with a brilliant VLE – but NO LIBRARY!
So, what am I saying here? I feel that most people I meet are forward looking people. But how many school librarians out there are not doing the rest of us any favours. If this cross-section of senior leaders in schools had their first introduction to a mouthy, bolshie,
advocating, ICT-literate librarian when they met me – what can we all do to promote our role and services before ICT takes us in the wrong direction entirely – i.e. closure?
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Agree with all of this. My problem is “where do I start ?” I would love to get into RSS for example but (although I have had a little dabble) I don’t really understand it or what to do and the explanations on the sites might just as well be written in chinese for all the sense they make to me. I’m the sort that need a real person to sit down and demonstrate it to me for 15 mins or so. Then I might understand.
I am on of the first to admit to loving a traditional mainly book based library but I do feel it is important for school librarians to explore other avenues and keep up with the fast moving world of ICT. I do not, and would not want to have, a library full of computers; I run a library not a computer suite. However it is important to integrate all methods of information retrieval and storage and to allow ICT to complement books. My Year 7 induction starts with using books and pupils doing research projects booked into the library are expected to use books, and quote them in a bibliography as well as computers. Computers can be used effectively to promote reading and books and I think we should aim to understand the strenghts and weaknesses of both media. On a professional level we can not afford to ignore ICT so best to harness it and use it to our advantage, keep up the profile of the library and the librarian by achieving a judicious balance.
I cannot express emphatically enough how much I agree with everything you have said! it’s about time we were seen as ‘Information Professionals’ and not just as ‘keepers of books’ but sometimes we are our own worst enemy. I know we are kindred spirits Anne – always ‘playing’ on the internet and trying new things but I fully sympathise with people who struggle with ICT. If we are to excite and keep the interest of young people however we need to to keep current and marry use of the printed word with more effective use of IT. At the moment I am working on using we parts via our Learning Gateway to showcase the library catalogue and advise staff of new books and I am greatly enjoying making our area attractive and inviting. Well done for flying the flag with senior leaders!
Your post and the responses are evidence of the learning that school librarians are doing every day. For the solo person in the school, the learning curve is steep. In this exciting contributory culture filled with amazing choices, we should be respectful of even the small learning steps. See, for example, “Choosing Assessments that Matter” http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/kqweb/kqarchives/volume35/355/kqw35_5abilock.pdf
There always seems to be tension between librarians and IT people, particularly if they feel you are ‘muscling in’ on ‘their’ territory. However, I don’t see why they should be mutually exclusive. I have no interest in massing about with code, hardware and databases, but am interested in using IT to enthuse students. On the other hand, most IT people have no interest in information literacy, encouraging reading or teaching pedagogy. We can have a finger in both pies, whereas they are not really interested…
I like web 2.0 because of its simplicity, particularly the fact that people can publish easily. At present, that seems to be mostly staff. Or at least relating to school/library issues; pupils are busy publishing, but usually in very different forums.
If librarians can harness the enthusiasm for social networking, information sharing and writing/publishing on the web, we’d be laughing!
Judi, there’s a short step-by-step guide to RSS on my website, here: http://101tips.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/16-rss-feeds/
Librain: nice site.
I can’t think of a better person than you Anne to represent the profession in a group of senior leaders! How wonderful!
I think it is time that librarians reconsider what their role is…we are not in school to preserve the book collection unless that is what the school wants …we are there to provide an information SERVICE and if our school suddenly decides that what they want is a completely machine driven information resource centre, then it is up to us as information professionals to provide them with the very best electronic collection of resources. Please understand I am personally a book person at heart but my heart is not what matters here! Our job is to provide the service required by the school. I have told my HEAD that if he decides to close the library room, that is fine as long as there is an icon on every workstation in the school that says ‘library’ (or equivalent term) and that that is run by an information professional. In other words, what is crucial is that the school community has access to mediated access to information via the help of an information professional…no matter what the dissemination media (whether it is a good fiction ‘read’ on an ipod, a website, a blog or a database!) My only concern about a paperless world is the energy required…it must be more ‘green’ to read from books than all the electricity required to run all the computers in a school all day long! Please don’t think that I wouldn’t fight for my library room…this is a theoretical argument. However, I must confess that since I started downloading fiction to my ipod I read about 3 times as much. I can listen when I garden, iron, and all those boring jobs. My garden never looked so good! Plus I can go to sleep every night with the sleep timer on and not worry when I fall asleep in the middle of the story! I find it hard to go back to print now. ( I have now been ‘outed’ as a heretic in the library world!)
Oh, but nothing beats the smell of a totally new book!