Today, I was reading Joyce Valenza's post about a tour of school library websites. She writes that it is EXTREMELY important that school libraries have a virtual/web presence. In my current position as a distance education librarian, I cannot agree more. For me as I try to change careers, I find it SO FRUSTRATING to see boring, out-of-date, or worse, poorly created websites. This is a disservice to the students. As the librarian at St. Andrews Episcopal Upper School,Barb Jensen, said it's great to work with teachers to create class specific wikis that showcase "resources that students will use to satisfy requirements and show and evaluate their results".
Joyce also showed examples from Buffy Hamilton who uses multimedia and social networking applications on her site at Creekview High School. There are other librarians out there incorporating RSS feeds, Twitter Feeds and LIBguides, to name a few other technologies.
I think it is important to use any technologies we can to connect the library with students and students with resources. How can students do that with websites that lack lists of resources or are not visually appealing or even well-organized?
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Good point- the answer is that students can't. I also think that school libraries should have an engaging and interesting web presence, but I think a lot of librarians (especially ones who are not very tech saavy) look at it as an additional chore or a burden. There also seem to be libraries that are under restrictions as far as what they can post and others that are not. For example, I think Buffy Hamilton's blog, the Unquiet Library, is awesome, but she does put up pictures and videos of her students. I think some places would not allow students to consent to this.
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