Reaching out
School library mission expands, links classroom to world

By Anne Kibbler,
Herald-Times In School Reporter
February 11, 2003

Permission to repost this article was granted by the Herald-Times Online version, located at HoosierTimes.com

Sharon Roualet's predecessor at the Edgewood High School library painstakingly typed a record of each book on a card and filed it in a multi-drawer cabinet that catalogued the school's print collection.

Today, the cabinet serves as a sturdy base for the computers that give students access to the library's online records.

The computers symbolize the changes technology has brought to libraries and the people who run them. Those changes are evident in schools, where librarians are known as school media specialists and where libraries are lively centers for research, recreational reading and multimedia production.

"More and more in our profession we are expected to and trained to collaborate with teachers on research projects and on developing literacy," Roualet said. "The technology frees us up to do other things."

A library abuzz

The library at Childs Elementary was a busy place last Wednesday morning.

School media specialist Judy Williams read a book to a second-grade class and used an overhead projector to explain the workings of an upcoming reading project.

Sixth-graders Francesca Smith and Morgan Bailey discussed their grade's 1950s-themed opera, the costumes for which they planned to research on the Internet.

Parent volunteer Nancy Obermeyer helped students from Amy Lanham's fourth-grade class scan documents into the computer--and they showed her how to save the material to a "locker" so it could be accessed in their classroom.

Every child and teacher in the school has such a locker--an online storage space that can be accessed from any computer in the building.

"When I came here, there was a computer lab of very old computers where students would do touch-typing and math drills," said Williams, who earned a master of library science degree while teaching fifth and sixth grade in local schools. She started at Childs eight years ago.

"It was skill and drill. That has almost been eliminated from our school."

When the old computers died, the school bought four new ones for each classroom and several more for the library.

"But then the hard work really began--promoting multimedia software teachers could use with the kids no matter what the subject," Williams said. "Now they are creating wonderful projects, giving kids different ways to show what they have learned."

A collaborative effort

Williams works side by side with teachers, helping them use technology to enhance the curriculum.

When groups of students in Jayma Acton's third-grade class created dioramas for an animal project, Williams helped students with the research and showed them how to use the digital camera to take pictures of each diorama.

The students used microphones to add commentary to the images. When they were done, Williams helped put each group's work together in the form of a Power Point presentation to show parents.

In Kris Stewart's first-grade class, students asked their parents about their ancestors, then researched their countries of origin.

Williams showed the students how to use a computer application called KidPix to create documents with maps, flags and symbols of their chosen country.

When the presentations are finished, Williams will import them to her computer and turn them into a slide show.

"Having computers in the classroom means Mrs. Stewart can be doing other things and keep an eye on these kids," Williams said. "She can invite me in to help her students. That's one thing about being a librarian that's wonderful. I get to know what's going on in every classroom."

Librarian's role has evolved

Daniel Callison, director of school library media education at Indiana University's School of Library and Information Science, said the ideal school media specialist plays an essential role in the school, working hand-in-hand with teachers.

The school library, he said, should be an information center and technology hub that feeds out to the rest of the school.

And beyond.

In some Indianapolis schools, school media specialists are beginning to enable information delivery through school Web sites to students and parents in their homes.

"It's now a role of the school media specialist working with kids and teachers to become sophisticated selectors of information over these online systems," Callison said.

Roualet agrees.

"When you're a kid looking at information, you sometimes don't know what you've found," she said. "There's a lot more to research than just finding things. You need to understand it and make it into something."

Print collections endangered

While Roualet and Williams spend a lot of time helping students and teachers with computer-based research projects, that doesn't mean books are no longer important.

Both librarians are eager to keep upgrading their print collections, but say they have been restricted by budget problems.

A $6 million, two-year matching state grant for school library printed materials was cut in half last summer. Since schools had already received their allocation of the first $3 million of the grant, that means they get no state money this year to buy books.

The lack of funds and the recent emphasis on technology purchases mean many school library print collections are out of date.

"My latest World Almanac is from 2000," Roualet said. "A lot of the books kids have seen elsewhere, we don't have. They stop thinking of you as the first place to go to get books."

Roualet has resorted to selling her library's collection of Indiana University yearbooks to raise funds.

"Just like everybody else in Indiana, we're trying to get money reinstated and trying to get base funding," Roualet said. "Our book budget is the same as or less than we had in 1989. Nobody gets raises, and book prices double."

Still, both Williams and Roualet continue to use books successfully to attract children to reading.

The tables at the Childs library are covered with books that Williams has pulled from the shelves for display.

She reads on a weekly basis to children in kindergarten and first grade and holds literature groups in classrooms.

At Edgewood, Roualet runs the annual Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award program, in which students read and vote for nominated books.

"It's true that you can scare a student with a thick book, but I don't think it's entirely true that kids hate to read," said Roualet.

Edgewood has begun offering a reading elective, which allows students to go to the library and simply read a book for 50 minutes.

"It's amazing," Roualet said. "When we first started, I thought it would be like study hall or a nap session. It's not. They just read. They're my best customers."

H-T In School reporter Anne Kibbler can be reached at 331-4369 or by e-mail at akibbler@heraldt.com

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