Commentary on School Library Websites - J Valenza

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 For me as I try to change careers, I find it SO FRUSTRATING to see boring, out-of-date, or worse, poorly created websites.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?

Pathfinder's and Google Books

I've never really thought of using Google books on a Pathfinder. At the university level, we teach our students that Google books are available, but students may not have access to the entire book. I am of two minds about this. On one hand, it really does have the potential to expand your collection without the support of a budget. On the other hand, how much are we really expanding collections if we only have access to parts of a book. Also, what are we teaching our kids, by telling them it is o.k. to only have access to partial information? Will they ignore a relevant pathfinder source that is in print in favor of one on the web?

Other sources that I think could be utilized in lieu of, or in conjunction with, Google Books could be Project Gutenburg (albeit older books), Library of Congress (also historical), state library consortium's access to digital books (Maryland Digital Library), and possibly college or university libraries. I'm not anti-Google books, but I think we also need to take a close look at the drawbacks of using them and explain those to our students.