Week 6 Thing #15

After reading the articles on the Future of Libraries, I felt slightly overwhelmed but certainly agreed that libraries need to be very aware of today's patron needs. So how does that fit in with our school libraries? There are a few thoughts:

1. Our secondary school libraries need a major weed - there is too much old stuff on the shelves and students can't see the good stuff due to the 'weeds'.
2. We need to create pathfinders for our secondary students and if we do this district -wide then it will reduce the labour (collaborate). Joyce Valenza suggests a wiki - that's next week's lesson.
3. We need to start using blogs with our students and set up our own library blogs that students and staff. I like the idea of blogging as students progress through the research process - what an opportunity for some metacognitive processing.
4. We need to do more outreach to let students and teachers know of the Virtual Library available to them on our board's reference portal. Too many rely only on Google.
5. Our province has funded databases for all publicly -funded schools and libraries. This has provided very valuable resources to our staff and students and has made the library accessible 24/7. It's part of an initiative called Knowledge Ontario
6. Our public library and the Knowledge Ontario initiative both have initiated an Ask a Librarian service so students can get help whenever they need it.

We're getting there but we have a long way to go.