Miles’s Library: Annotated

Doug Johnson doug0077@gmail.com

This is a book chapter from Visionary: Leaders for Information compiled by Dr. Arthur Winzenried from the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia.  You can order the book here.

7:00 AM

“Miles… Miles, honey, time to get up,” the librarian’s voice whispered softly in the still dark bedroom. Miles, a senior in the graduating high school class of 2025¹, slowly came awake.

“OK, OK, I’m awake, Marian. Schedule, please,” Miles requested using the auditory interface to his school library portal², accessed through a small device on his nightstand.

“You are meeting with your ecological science team F2F in Learning Space 17, Main Library at 8:45. Carlotta will be 15 minutes late. You’ve registered for “Advanced Semantic Web Searching” with Head Librarian Baxter from 9:30-11:00 in Seminar Room B of the Main Library. Your IEP³ Advisor, Dr. Li, wants to meet with you in her office at 1:00 about your senior project. And I have finalized the MUVE meeting schedule with Professor Shahada in Amman for 4:15 SLT this afternoon. Your lacrosse team practice has been cancelled, but time has been reserved in the simulation area of the gymnasium for team members wanting virtual practice⁴.”

“Gee, that’s all?”

“No, Miles, dear. Your report on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is due tomorrow. Would you like me to reserve a video rendering terminal in the library for you?”

“Marian, you are a slave driver!” Miles cried, slowly crawling out of bed.

8:30 AM

“Looks like almost a full day in the library for me,” Miles tells his girlfriend Jennie as they walk from the bus stop up to the school. Jennie is one of the main reasons that Miles still goes to his neighborhood bricks and mortar school at least three days a week.⁵ “Let’s grab a cup of coffee there while we have time.”

“Seems like you’ve been living in the library this year,” observed Jennie. “They should be charging you rent!”

“Well my senior project, ‘Can sims be programmed to exhibit free will?’ has really been more involving than I thought. I mean, it’s the perfect combination between my interest in religion and computer programming, but it’s been a lot more work than I thought. And the library has been my primary resource for this project.” Miles was embarrassed to admit that his presence in the school’s physical library was only a fraction of the time he spent in the library’s virtual spaces. “Just stamp ‘nerd’ on my forehead, I guess,” Miles sighed.

The library Miles and Jennie enter might look cavernous were it not for the low ceilings and dividers filled with green plants that break up the space into small, intimate work areas. A combination of soft seating and small, easily rearranged worktables in coordinated colors make the library look both work-like but comfortable. There is a low hum of conversation, especially near the entrance to the library where a small coffee shop is located, but noise-cancellation technologies keep the main part of the library surprisingly quiet – considering there are over 200 students working here. The perimeter of the library has doorways leading to small conference and seminar rooms, faculty offices (this location is in high demand), and technology labs filled with powerful, specialized computers. Student work is silently displayed throughout the library space on monitors of various sizes with small signs indicating the channel on which the audio is being broadcast.⁶

Students and faculty alike carry a variety of small portable computing devices that automatically connect to the data network via the library’s portal interface.⁷

Miles says goodbye to Jennie and heads toward Learning Space 17 for his meeting with his team.

8:45 AM

“Hey, Juan. Hey, Liz,” Miles says with a wave as he plops down on one of the sofas occupied by his learning team. “Any word from Carlotta?”

“She’s having an emergency with some stuff at home and will be audio conferencing with us⁸,” Juan reports.

“Sounds like the emergency is a bad hair day.” And with that, Carlotta’s voice says, “I heard that. And just for your information, I never have a bad hair day! But I do have a little sister with the sniffles.”

“OK, OK, I’ve got lots to do today,” Liz chides. “I think at the last meeting we decided that our project was going to be looking at creating self-reporting devices for the green plants here in the library powered by the small voltage they themselves actually produce. Are we still agreed?” Heads nod. (85% of all energy needed to power the school is generated by projects designed by the students themselves over the past 15 years.)

“So, Miles, what did your search on similar projects turn up?”

“Yeah, your creepy Marian avatar dig anything up?” asked Juan. “Do you still have her affection module running so she calls you sweetie, sweetie?”

“She’s not creepy, just 20^th century,” Miles replied. “She looks and sounds just like Shirley Jones’s character Marian in The Music Man. If you weren’t such a cultural Neanderthal, you’d appreciate the reference. As for her obvious and well-placed fondness for me, I’d say you’re just jealous⁹.”

Carlotta laughed, saying, “Miles and Juan, if you weren’t such good friends, I’d say you couldn’t get along.”

Miles is the acknowledged expert at data acquisition in the group. Liz’s strength is in leadership, organization and historical knowledge; Juan’s visual communication and math skills are outstanding; and Carlotta’s interpersonal abilities keep the team moving and working well together – plus she is the acknowledged science whiz of the team. Miles considers each of these fellow students an integral part of his Personal Learning Network.¹⁰

Miles himself does not conduct data searches – he programs bots that search for him. Ever since helping his older brother Paul create and modify creatures in the primitive simulation game Spore as a pre-schooler and later learning how to design custom Google Search¹¹ engines in elementary school, Miles has been devising ever more sophisticated programs that help him meet his information needs. The librarians have been instrumental in helping Miles develop these skills, and several thousand other students – and adults - use some of the search bots Miles has created. Lately, he has been giving the bots physical form as avatars and personalities using code from a new bank of 20^th century entertainer models.

“Marian found about 750 gig of materials related to using plants’ own electrical production properties to power sensors. I asked her to condense and audio-synth this data to five, ten and 15 minute summaries. I’ve sent the audio files of the three top reports to you. In my view, this project is increasingly doable…”

Encouraged by Miles’s findings, the group discusses next steps, creates a timeline, and debates the format of the final report on the project. Their next meeting on the coming Friday will be virtual, using the library’s video portal.

9:25AM

Miles hurries toward the seminar room on the other side of the library for his class with Librarian Baxter. Cutting around dozens of students working individually or in small groups, Miles glances up at the latest ALA’s LISTEN campaign “poster” being displayed on one of the library’s LED monitors. It features Tammy Fox, daughter of first decade hottie Megan Fox, displaying her favorite audio-book cover. Another LED promotes an ALA PLAY poster showing popular cartoonist Brady Johnson with his favorite video game. (The READ campaign was discontinued in 2020, along with the paper versions of the posters.)

Only one thing seems to be missing in Miles’s school library – books, magazines or any paper information source. The last print books – school yearbooks and some local history publications - were sent to Ghana to be digitized five years earlier. All those materials are now available online.¹²

Nearly 99.9% of intellectual property in all formats – text, visual, audio, and programming code – is in the world IP DataBank. On submitting work to the DataBank, a small identifying script is inserted into each work. Each time the creation is accessed, a nominal payment is made to its creator. Content users can pay either a flat monthly fee for unlimited access to the DataBank or pay per petabyte of data.¹³ Miles’s school library does not own or lease any information sources. But it has built, using freeware APIs, a powerful portal and guide to the DataBank.¹⁴ And it allows its staff and students to customize that portal.

Miles enters the seminar room just as Mr. Baxter begins to outline the objective of the 90 minute lecture/demonstration/guided practice session on honing one’s understanding of semantic web searching skills¹⁵, specifically dealing with language-specific idioms when doing multi-lingual searching with auto-translation tools. About ten students are attending in person and another 15 in library’s MUVE conference room. The virtual participants are not just from Miles’s school, but from other high schools, a university, and a home school. One participant is simply a retiree with an interest in the topic. The seminar will be recorded and added to the DataBank.

“Miles, what are you doing here?” Sergey backchannels using a primitive chat program. “You could be teaching this stuff!”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I heard Baxter just came back from an ALA conference with some beta code on idiom translation. I’m hoping that if I look interested enough, he’ll share.”

Mr. Baxter coughed. “Miles, would you GoogleJockey¹⁶ this seminar, just in case questions arise?” Miles nodded and made a mental note to find the etymology of that strange term.

11:00AM

Miles uses the time between the end of the seminar and his meeting with Dr. Li to grab a sandwich in the school cafeteria with Jennie and then take a quick nap in the library. Research on adolescent sleep needs convinced the library advisory committee that napping is a legitimate use of library resources and that library policies should reflect this. After Marian again awakens Miles, he checks his TwitFace account and then listens to two audio reports – one a real-voice podcast and the other a speech-synth conversion – recommended by Mr. Baxter in the earlier seminar.¹⁷ He reviews his progress on his senior thesis.

Miles’s school is one of several operating in his small community. It is based on a highly individualized, project-based, collaborative learning model that uses performance assessment only. “Developing creative problem-solvers with a conscience” is the articulated mission of the school. All required classes end when students are twelve and have passed the national reading/writing/math proficiency test. After age 12, each student works according to an IEP, written by the student, his parents, a team of teachers and school librarians, and the other members of his formal Personal Learning Network (PLN).

Another school in Miles’s community is entirely computer-based, with each student using a structured, game-based programmed curriculum designed for his individual educational program. A third school retains the “traditional” classroom, 50-minute period, teacher-led, core content model. Neither of these schools have either physical or virtual libraries or librarians. (Miles first podcast that earned him DataBank payments was a commentary arguing that sending children to traditional schools should be considered child abuse.) All families are given educational vouchers and are allowed to select which school to attend. Vouchers became politically feasible in 2017 when a law was passed that no school can charge more in tuition than the standard voucher amount and that all students, including those with special needs, are eligible for each school’s lottery that selects the incoming class. ¹⁸

1:00PM

“I’m very pleased with the progress you’ve been making on your senior project, Miles,” said Dr. Li with a smile. “Explain to me again why you believe that your sims are showing signs of free will.”

“It’s their preferences, Dr. Li!” Miles reports, “Kurzweil, one of my oldest sims, is choosing blue clothing at a rate outside statistical probabilities. In fact, even though he has a choice of several dozen colored garments from which to choose each day, he almost always chooses blue. He also seems to like anchovies on his pizza.”

“And you are sure this is not a programming bug?” asked Dr. Li.

“I’ve gone over the selection routines about 20 times and asked three others in my PLN to do independent audits of the code. Everyone agrees that Kurzweil should be making random choices.”

Dr. Li and Miles confer for nearly an hour, once bringing in Ms King, a Hong Kong librarian who specializes in science fiction in popular culture and its treatment of religious and moral dilemmas. She quickly produces a qualitative list of works in which self-aware technologies are featured.¹⁹

“Here’s one last dimension you might want to consider,” suggests Dr. Li. “What might be the meaning of this discovery on how we as humans view ourselves? That we humans may merely be “sims” in a great cosmic programming plan?”²⁰

Miles checks to make sure his audio note-taker²¹ caught this question, before agreeing that this was a good idea.

“Oh, before you go, I also want to check how the composition of your PLN is working for you. I understand that you did not accept my suggestion of dropping your grandfather’s membership in favor of adding a second programming expert.”

Miles considered his PLN. The school requires that all students have a “formal” personal learning network of twelve members. (Like other students, Miles’s informal PLN has over one hundred members at any one time accessed by a variety of networking tools.) For their formal PLN, some students create expert groups from specialized fields of high interest; others form a group with as diverse a representation as possible. Librarians are a part of nearly every student’s PLN and they take this responsibility seriously.²²

“With all respect, Dr. Li, I did keep Grandpa Doug on my PLN rather than choose another expert. I recognize he knows little about my major areas of study and is hopelessly out of date on anything technology related, but because of his advanced age, he sometimes adds a sense of perspective that I don’t get from other students or experts,” Miles maintains. “He’s also good for a joke now and then.”

Dr. Li nods. “Perspective is valuable, I will admit. But I’ve seen his jokes - pathetic!”

Miles thanks Dr. Li, and asks his librarian avatar Marian to send his advisor’s last question out to his PLN for input, thankful his senior year and this project are nearly complete. Miles is looking forward to his first year as a North Dakota State University Bison. His older brother Paul, however, has warned him that his first year of college will tough since many professors still lecture, He advises making sure his PDA has a full battery charge for multitasking during the core courses.

2:00PM

Miles uses the next hour putting the finishing touches on his report on Reinhold Niebuhr that’s due the next day.

Luckily, Marian was able to schedule Miles a full hour of time in the 3-D rendering computer lab.²³ This is one of the few individual projects for which Miles is responsible this term so he has chosen to examine his favorite 20^th century theologian’s influence on US government policy. After listening to and viewing over eighty hours of materials on the topic, Miles’s final project will be pseudo-discussion with Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Barak Obama, each discussing major Niebuhrian beliefs in relationship to their administration’s social policies.

Miles hopes that this project will be judged to merit inclusion in the school’s student research “virtual museum.” Miles’s older brother Paul holds the record number of pieces of student work in the museum with three projects. Miles’s goal is to get one more of his projects added this spring – giving him four. The permanent addition of student work to the museum is considered an honor.²⁴

Like his fellow students, Miles writes very little, choosing instead to convey his ideas and research using the more natural communication methods of sight and sound. Technology makes it simpler to create audio and video reports than written ones. When a teacher does require a written “paper,” Miles uses a speech-to-text conversion program to create his first draft and then edits that version. Most video and audio reports can be done using his personal computing device, but now and then Miles likes to explore more sophisticated modes of communication like the 3-D rendering software that requires a more powerful processing. The library’s labs supply equipment for this purpose. Miles and his fellow students can write very well; they simply choose to communicate in what they feel are more powerful ways.²⁵

At one point, Miles get stuck on a highly complex task he asks of the rendering program. In answer to an online call, the support librarian pops up in a window in the lower right corner of the screen and efficiently helps Miles over the rough spot. Visual literacy is considered as important, if not more, than textual literacy for Miles and his classmates in this postliterate work environment, educational system and society. Librarians view the communications portion of information fluency models as a critical part of their curriculum.

Satisfied at last, Miles stores his simulation in his digital warehouse along with all other work he has created since he was in elementary school.²⁶  He glances at the clock on his screen and decides that he has time to get home and do his MUVE conference with Dr. Shahada there.

4:00 PM

As Miles walks in the front door, his dad calls out from his home office, “Supper’s at six – I blocked it off on your calendar. Attendance is not optional. Oh, and when is that lawn going to get mowed? The grass gets any longer you’ll not only have to mow, but bale as well.”

Sighing at the hopelessly agrarian reference, Miles acknowledges his dad and heads to the family room. Rather than use the smaller, 54” screen on the computer in his room, he decides to go holographic for his meeting with Dr. Shahada. He grabs a cola from the fridge, gets comfortable in one of the big easy chairs, and opens the connection to the University of Jordan. The family room fades and is replaced by a holographic multiuser virtual environment. Dr. Shahada is already at his desk and Miles finds himself sitting across from him. The image is good enough to read the text on the diplomas displayed on the wall behind the professor’s desk.

“Salaam lakim, Doctor,” Miles begins, happy to have a chance to practice his Arabic, a language he has studied both formally and informally for ten years. (The rest of the conversation is conducted in Arabic.) One of the reasons Miles’s parents chose his current school was that its staff recognize that multi-lingual professionals are at an advantage in the global economy.²⁷ In 2015 when Miles chose Arabic as one of his “focus” languages (along with Tagalog), his parents wondered if other languages would have been more beneficial. But the rise in democratic governments and a permanent peace settlement in the Middle East in the 2010s led to the region’s growth as a world economic and educational leader.

“The blessings of Allah upon you as well, Miles,” Dr. Shahada replies with a smile. “I’ve been looking forward to our conversation today. To get to the point, one of the librarians here at UJ spotted some of the avatar-represented search bots you’ve been creating and also noticed your proficiency in Arabic. Our library in collaboration with the computer science department here at UJ would like to offer you a summer internship with us. You would be working with our librarians to improve our own library portal by adding idiomatic Arabic-speaking avatars.”

“It sounds exciting!” remarked Miles. ‘Would I be doing this work in Amman or telecommuting?”²⁸ He and Dr. Shahada continue to discuss this opportunity until nearly six o’clock.

One of Miles’s school library’s major services is to provide and support “learning portals.” While text-based portals have been a common library offering for over ten years, the virtual environment interface is relatively new. When Miles logs on to his library portal, he sees a 3D representation of his physical school library. His avatar moves through it easily, looking far more natural than the funky Second Life-like creations of early MUVEs. He can see which members of his PLN network are online, check for messages (audio, video and text), do real-time video/audio communications with those both in and out of the library, and view his selected and school-required news feeds. Around the library at various stations are librarian avatars with whom Miles can engage. While one sits behind a general information desk, others are subject-specific, offering guidance in languages, science, mathematics, history, communications and other areas. Virtual doorways lead to teacher, advisor and guidance virtual offices and to the school’s virtual museum of permanent student project displays. There is also a doorway to Miles’s “warehouse,” a visual depiction of links to all the projects he has undertaken as a student.²⁹

What makes the portal especially valuable to Miles and others in his school is its customizability. Using open source APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and programming scripts, Mile has re-arranged the standard library layout, deleting some components like the annoying electronic posters and adding features like a real-time Arabic translation avatar, a collection of rare Tagalog documents, doorways to several research labs, and hidden door to a representation of his bedroom at home where he can work on personal tasks.³⁰

It is, however, Miles work in creating custom-search bots represented by avatars that excites him. The library provides a set of tools that allow students to create “librarians” who will follow carefully composed search parameters, following ever more sophisticated semantic rules.

6:00 PM

During his conference with Dr. Shahada, Miles received a message comprised of several ideograms. It was Jennie keying from her phone, asking Miles if he wanted to meet her for a jog. He discretely replied that he was busy, but suggested they meet in the 20^th Cent game after supper. After mowing the lawn with a push mower, Miles sits at the kitchen table where his mom, dad and 10-year-old sister Maggie are already engaged in conversation.

Maggie tells about the latest version of Oregon Trail that she and her team are playing in their U.S. history class and about the research she is doing on animal rights of the 19^th century; Dad shares his day of F2F pastoral visits to his elderly parishioners and how nice it was to get out from behind a computer screen. But it’s Miles’s mom’s reflections about her day as the town’s public library director that really interest him.

“I am always surprised at just how popular our “Edit Yourself, Market Yourself, Support Yourself” workshops are – even after all these years of holding them. It seems it’s take some people a long time to realize that the DataBank and payment plan changed the model of making money from one’s intellectual property. While many creators choose to contract with editors and marketers – often people who once worked for large publishing companies – even more people have added editing and marketing to their own job skill sets. It’s really gratifying to see the public library as an effective community and personal development resource.”³¹

While Miles and Maggie visit their public library rarely, they both take advantage of its online presence. Maggie is a part of an active gaming group sponsored by the children’s section and relies on its recommendations of new games. Miles attends the public library’s online seminars and often consults its resident personal branding guru – “Purple Cow” Smith.

“I suppose it’s time to hit the studies,” Miles says after finishing his last bite of dessert.

“Time to talk mushy to Jennie is more like it,” teases Maggie. “And don’t forget, it’s your night to do the dishes.”

7:00 PM

After the last spoon is dried and put away, Miles spends 30 minutes playing virtual lacrosse – the cancellation of his regular athletic practice is making him feel a bit sluggish. He checks his vital stats on the game station after his workout and sends them to his data storage locker in the library.

Back in his room, Miles logs into the MMORPG, 20^th Cent. His regular avatar easily moves from one virtual environment to another, quickly morphing when the situation calls for it. Jennie is already online.

“My friend Winslet just finished programming a challenge this afternoon and asked me to beta it.” 20^th Cent, like most popular games, relies on users to create quests, puzzles and adventures for each other.³² Both Miles and Jennie prefer “amateur” created content to that designed by self-designated professionals. “Think you can survive the sinking of the Titanic this evening?” Jennie asks. “You know, you look a little like Leo DeCaprio.”

“Let’s try it. If I am going down with the ship, I can’t think of anyone I would rather have with me.”

Jennie’s and Miles’s avatars, now looking like Leo and Kate, teleport to the White Star docks where they board the ill-fated ship – Miles playing steerage, Jennie, first class.

Jennie and Miles are capable readers. Due to an early childhood educational programs, both, in fact, could read before entering kindergarten. But like the majority of their peers, they nearly always choose other media for nearly all their information and entertainment needs. Even video and audio are increasingly less popular than gaming. Miles and his peers demand engagement – not just entertainment – and engagement requires interaction. ³³

Games themselves have evolved, becoming an art form and are considered a medium of serious commentary on human nature. The Pulitzer Prize in gaming reflects the respect now paid to the creators of serious games for their plots, characters, settings, tones and themes.³⁴ And games, of course, are an accepted and effective pedagogical tool – especially for elementary students.

It takes Miles and Jennie almost three hours and a dozen attempts before both are rescued before freezing in the icy North Atlantic waters. Jennie notes several anachronisms that Winslet might want to fix before public release of this scenario. Miles gives Jennie a virtual kiss goodnight, logs off the game and heads off to brush his teeth.

10:30 PM

There is a quiet knock on Miles’s bedroom door.

“Hi, Mom. Come in.”

“What are you reading, sweetie?” Miles’s mom asks when she sees him propped up in bed with an actual paper book on resting on his knees. As an avid reader herself, Mom is always a little disheartened by how little her two younger children read for pleasure and is delighted when one actually picks up a book.

“Oh, it an antique paperback called The Diamond Age by a 20^th century writer named Stephenson. Pretty interesting how he predicted the OLPC movement that Negroponte and his cult began. Uh, Mom, can we talk a minute?”

“Sure. What’s going on?” Mom asks, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Don’t faint, but I think I might major in library science next year instead of computer programming. Jennie was teasing me this morning about how much time I spend in the library and it got me thinking about how much I do like working there.”

“Well, that is a surprise, Miles! The field and training has changed so much since I got my MLS 25 years ago, and it has really changed since your grandpa got his library degree almost 50 years ago – long before personal computers were commonplace, let alone the Internet,” Miles’s mom observed. “My training seems obsolete, now. Good thing I’m in management where I don’t need many technology skills.”

“You know I talked to Grandpa just now, bouncing this idea off him. He said about the same thing – that the tools and roles of the librarian have changed so dramatically, especially in the last 20 years or so. But then he added something. He said that the tools librarians use change, the importance of certain tasks that librarians perform changes, and even the services libraries offer to support their schools and communities change. But some things, like the librarian’s mission and values, remain constant. Librarians still support intellectual freedom and fight censorship. Librarians are still about open inquiry and access to information and ideas. Librarians are still about helping people find and use information that is reliable and help them use it to improve their lives. And librarians have always been about helping people help themselves by learning how to be life-long learners and informed decision-makers. And Grandma Annie, who was listening in, added that librarians have always wanted people to find enjoyment, fun and excitement in learning and reading.”

Miles’s mom rolled her eyes. “Did Grandpa also go on about how librarians’ people skills, not their technical skills, that are the most important?”

“Yup. But you know he also said that he thought I’d make a great librarian and would be proud to have me in ‘his’ field.”

“Well, that’s your grandfather – always trying to recruit the best and the brightest.”

Miles yawned. “Thanks, Mom. I need to get some sleep. My senior project is one day closer to being due so I need to really get cracking on it tomorrow.”

“Good night, Sweetie.”

As his mom left the room, Miles put down his book, switched off the bedside lamp, and spoke to his avatar,

“Please wake me up at 7, Marian. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Miles, my love.”

“I’ve gotta turn down those affection settings!” Miles thought as he rolled over and closed his eyes.

_________________________________

1. 2025 is the approximate year my youngest grandson, Miles, will graduate from high school assuming children are still attending 13 years of schooling beginning at the age of five or six - a big assumption.

2. Customizable portals are common, although still text based, as of today. iGoogle is a popular example. “Add-on’s” in the Firefox browser also exemplify the extensibility that users are being to require of any information accessing/processing tool.

3. An Individualized Education Plan is required by law for U.S. children having been identified with special needs today. By 2025, these will be required for all students and created with the help of sophisticated assessments and data-mining tools.

4. The Nintendo Wii gaming device currently allows users to participate in simulated sports and exercise.

5. Physical schools will still exist in 2025 since the societal charges placed on education of socialization and child containment will still exist. Inexpensive childcare will continue to be demanded by working parents – even if more are working from home.

6. David Loetscher and others have envisioned a “learning commons” that is user-centered with workspaces for a variety of groups with a variety of purposes. See: Loertscher, Koechlin, and Zwaan. The New Learning Commons: Where Learners Win. Salt Lake City, UH: Hi Willow, 2008.

7. Today’s netbooks and smartphones using 802.11x and EVDO wireless networks are early versions of those being used by Miles and his contemporaries.

8. Built in laptop cameras and microphones along with simple programs like Skype are already making video conferencing commonplace in schools. The trend of more ubiquitous cameras and microphones, simple conferencing tools, and greater broadband connectivity will continue to grow.

9. Customizability in both ability and appearance are common in both MUVE (MutliUser Virtual Environments) such as SecondLife and MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer On-line Role-Paying Games) such as World of Warcraft avatars today.

10, Collaboration and group work skills are a part of every set of “21^st Century Skills” being promoted.

11. Customized search engines can be built now using Google Custom Search.

12. Full text searching of over seven million books is currently available as part of Google’s Search the Book project. Google has reached an agreement with publishers to scan and make available not just out of copyright titles, but out of print titles.

13. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig in his book Free Culture (New York: Penguin, 2004) advances the idea of such a compensation scheme for intellectual property creators, based on redistributing the proceeds from a tax on recording media to compensate musicians and videographers.

14. Subscription services to full text magazine indexes, video collections and e-book collections have been common since the 1990s.

15. The semantic web, a means of describing data on the Internet in ways that make it more easily searched by discriminating among homonyms and other word meaning discrimination techniques. Tim Berners-Lee, Hendler, James and Lassila, Ora “The Semantic Web”. Scientific American Magazine. May 17, 2001.

16. Assigning a class Google Jockey is a current practice in higher education. See EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative “7 Things You Should Know About Google Jockeying,” May 2006.

17. Miles’s library serves the “postliterate.” Any number of recent studies are concluding that reading is declining – primarily the reading of novels and longer works of nonfiction.^. I define the postliterate as those who can read, but choose to meet their primary information and recreational needs through audio, video, graphics and gaming media. Print for the postliterate is relegated to brief personal messages, short informational needs, and other functional, highly pragmatic uses such as instructions, signage and time-management device entries – each often highly supplemented by graphics. The postliterate’s need for extended works or larger amounts of information is met through visual and/or auditory formats.

The term “postliterate library” may at first glance appear an oxymoron, but it is not. Our best libraries are already postliterate, increasingly meeting the needs of users who communicate, play and learn using media other than print. And the attitudes we as professional librarians adopt toward the postliterate may well determine whether our libraries continue to exist.

My article, “Libraries for a Postliterate Society” Multimedia & Internet @ Schools, July/August 2009, further describes these ideas.

18. The societal demand for school “choice” has led to many different options beyond the traditional public school in the United States. Private schools, parochial schools, magnet schools, charter schools, on-line schools, open-enrollment – with a demand for government tuition vouchers controlled by parents – are all examples of the diversification of education. The reality is that not every type of school needs a library, even today.

19. The exponential growth of information will require the specialization of librarians into areas of interest.

20. Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Near (New York: Viking, 2005) suggests this explanation - that we are all part of some cosmic simulation game, for human existence.

21. A growing body of academic research shows that students who record instructions and classroom lectures get better grades, justifying personal mp3 player/recorders in schools.

22. Personal Learning Networks, a self-created set of experts, colleagues and resources that can be relied upon to meet daily learning needs, usually dependent on networked technology, are currently being explored by educators.

23. Despite the ubiquity of personal computing devices, cutting edge applications will continue to need very large processing capabilities, unaffordable by individuals, and therefore housed in the library.

24. Educators have long known that the larger the audience for a student’s work, the greater the level of concern by the student about the quality of the work. Permanent collections of student work, organized and managed by the library, should become a part of the school culture and contribution to the world’s knowledge base.

25. Education and librarianship have a current bias toward print. This communication/ information format has served civilization well for several millennia. Most professionals today demonstrate high levels of proficiency in print literacy skills and they can be expected to defend the necessity of such skills. Most educators are competent readers, writers and print analysts, but neophyte video, audio and graphic producers, consumers, and critics. It is human nature to be dismissive of those competencies that we ourselves lack. However, postliteracy is a return to more natural forms of multi-sensory communication - speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multi-media formats. In Miles’s school the bias toward print will fade as new generations of media-savvy educators take charge.

26. Comprehensive portfolios, managed with the help of librarians, will be under life-long development by all workers of the “creative class.” Cheap mass storage of materials in digital formats will allow creators to keep all work and never delete a project or file.

27. Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006) described a world economy and argued that cultural understanding would play an increasing role in successful business.

28. The continuing increase in fuel costs has led to a growing percentage of home-based workers. Home based work has led to a greater need for “dispositions” as outlined in AASL’s Skills for the 21^st Century Learner (Chicago: American Library Association, 2007).

29. An online presence has been of growing importance since the 1990s for all institutions, including libraries. The MUVE 3-D environment has been predicted to became the standard interface for web navigation.

30. One of the reasons for the popularity of today’s Firefox browser is its extensibility. By using “add-ons,” one can customize the tool to meet one’s personal style of working. The expectation of extensibility will continue to grow.

31. Lulu.com and other self-publishing sites are changing the relationship of professional editors and markets and writers.

32. The MUVE SecondLife is a model of an environment that is almost completely user-generated; the MMORPG World of Warcraft (modeled after the earlier analog Dungeons and Dragons game) relies on user-generated “quests.”

33. The “Net” Generation is spending more time in front of screens but less watching television - demanding entertainment be interactive rather than passive.

34. The library helps its patrons discover and understand this still relatively new medium, offering game discussion groups, organizing game fan clubs, and arranging game developer talks and seminars.

Gone Missing

Head for the Edge, May/June 2010

There are a number of workers I just don’t see much of anymore…

• I don’t see parking lot attendants when entering or leaving the airport anymore. My credit card talks to a machine on the way in and again on the way out.
• I don’t talk to check-in people at the airline counters anymore since I rarely check bags. My credit card talks to a terminal that prints out my boarding pass. That is if I’ve not already checked in online and printed my pass at home.
• I am seeing fewer bank tellers and grocery clerks. My cash card talks to the ATM and to the cash register at the supermarket after I have scanned my own groceries.
• My children think I am telling tall tales when I tell them that I once had “people” who pumped my gas, washed my car windows, filled my tires and sometimes gave me a free tumbler as a gift when I went to a service station.
• I don’t hear the voice of a human telephone operator, tech support or reservation clerks until I’ve waded through a half dozen phone menus. 

Below is a chart labeled with the sexy title “Trends in Tasks Done by the U.S. Workforce 1969-1998 (1969=0)” that appeared way, way back in 2004.¹

Parking lot attendants and their kindred that have gone missing fall into the “Routine Cognitive Work” and ‘Routine Manual Work” categories. The information given and processes performed were all standardized - multiple-choice answers, if you will. Any situation arose that called for something more than an A, B, C, or D response a supervisor was found.

So a couple questions…

Are librarians vulnerable to these shifts in this labor market? Will librarians who are only information dispensers, book readers, babysitters, checkout clerks, and multiple choice quiz givers be automated and “go missing?”  Can even readers’ advisors be automated? (Amazon seems to do a pretty good job.)

Have you asked yourself lately which of the tasks on which you spend your time are routine? Do most things do you do require professional judgment, problem-solving and, yes, creativity? What do you provide that an online resource can’t?

If all educators, librarians, teachers and administrators, don’t attended to adding value as expert thinkers and complex communicators, rebelling against “teacher-proof” classroom models, fact-heavy mandated curricula, and objective basic skills testing as a sole measure of student performance, the de-professionalizing of our jobs may well come sooner rather than later.

It’s human nature to grouse a bit when confronted by a problem at work. Perhaps we ought to be grateful instead, if problems are what allow us to demonstrate our complex communication and expert thinking skills helping insure our jobs.

Are we giving our students experience practicing “Complex Communications” and “Expert Thinking” skills in their assignments?  Daniel Pink in his new book Drive² suggests all teachers ask these questions about the homework they give:

• Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to do this work?
• Does this assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task (as opposed to rote reformulation of something already covered in class)?
• Do my students understand the purpose of the assignment? That is, can they see how doing this additional activity at home contributes to the larger enterprise in which the class is engaged?

If we are really believe future workers need to be creative problem-solvers, why do we still give objective tests over the recall of trivia and only test low-level basic skills on such a regular basis? Do we construct information and technology literacy projects that honestly call for higher order thinking skills – or are we asking only for a simple regurgitation of trivia? Do we ask our students to both communication complex ideas and to do so with complex media?

I keep thinking about a prediction made in the mid-90’s by a federal DOE official. She suggested that one day schools for the economically disadvantaged would be full of computers (drill and practice, programmed learning, evaluators) while wealthy schools would have human teachers (mentors, guides, challengers). Ironic at the time; accurate today.

Those being trained by automatons to be automatons will be among the first to go missing in tomorrow’s job market.

1. Levy. Frank and Richard J. Murnane. “Education and the Changing Job Market” Educational Leadership, October 2004.
2. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead, 2009.

Most of my Head for the Edge columns, updated and edited, can be found in my latest book. Buy it and I might be able to afford a nicer nursing home one day. Thank you.



Head for the Edge, March/April 2010

Facebook Now Growing By Over 700,000 Users A Day - AllFacebook, Feb 27, 2009 <www.allfacebook.com>

I mentioned Facebook a couple months ago in a workshop I gave on the role of Web 2.0 resources in education. A question was asked that I had not before considered: Should a teacher “friend” his/her students on Facebook? My off-the-cuff response was “Absolutely not.” My gut reaction was that doing so would violate the teacher/student relationship and could lead to actual or perceived inappropriate interactions.

Let me be frank. When I introduce Facebook to educators, I admit upfront that I don’t see the fascination with this form of communication, and moreover, I don’t see its educational usefulness. Other Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, threaded discussions and such, yes; but Facebook, no.

So I didn’t feel truly qualified to answer the question about friending students and felt a little guilty responding so definitively. So it was a relief to see Nancy Willard’s strongly worded email on the WWWedu listserv that seconded my opinion. She wrote:

Any teacher who links to a student on MySpace or Facebook is an ABSOLUTE FOOL!!!!! I strongly support and advise district policies against this for two reasons:

1. There is a vast amount of flirting that goes on on these sites. Student get crushes on teachers. When a teacher gets a flirtatious message from a student, that teacher is already in trouble. Respond back with warmth and you are an online predator. Respond critically and the student could exact revenge. The teachers who are most likely to get into major trouble are the younger ones – who have not had to deal with student crushes before and who may still be in the flirting online mode. The risks include arrest and life as a registered sex offender.
2. People on these sites send friendship requests to friends of people they have linked to. A teacher would become the “guarantor” of all of his or her online friends – including all of the material these friends post and the friend’s interactions with students.

Wise advice. Yet we as adults have experienced the power of online networking as a resource in our own professional development. Where would many of us be without LM_Net, Nings, blogs, wikis and their ilk? Networks are powerful learning tools. So why do we as adults often remain so cautious, even frightened, about using networking tools with our students?

Might we be confusing social networking and educational networking?

Let’s see if an analogy might work here. Most teachers would not find it proper to hang out with their students at the local bowling alley. Healthy adults tend to play with people their own age. Yet, coaching a school bowling team or even chaperoning a class party at a bowling alley is perfectly acceptable. It’s not the bowling alley that’s the issue; it’s the context.

Nancy observes:

There is – and should remain – a vast difference between “social media” and “educational media.” When educators blur the distinctions, this causes significant problems.

Are schools making this distinction in policy-making and writing guidelines?

I’ve come to the conclusion that we should stop using the term social networking to describe the kinds of collaborative online learning experiences we’d like students doing as a part of their formal education. The term connotes recreational or frivolous use of Internet resources.

Instead I propose we talk about “educational networking” and “social learning.” When we describe our activities and tools with these terms, they not only sound more substantial, but more accurately reflect what we’re trying to do with these technologies.

Regardless of the vocabulary used, educators need some guidelines about how to use networking sites, both social and educational, professionally and personally. (Yes, adults can and do get in trouble online without kids being involved at all.)

To spark the conversation about what reasonable guideline might look like, Jen Hegna of the Byron (MN) schools and I wrote a simple document “Guidelines for Educators Using Social and Educational Networking Sites” that you can find here: <doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2009/8/20/networking-guidelines-revised.html>.  Use it and improve it.

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler cite studies that the ability to form “learning groups” in which participants collaboratively construct personal meaning for content studied is the most important factor in college students being successful.

We must give our students the opportunity to experience and use such learning groups – whether face-to-face or online. But we need to clarify the difference between social and educational networks and provide both adult and young users guidance in using them wisely.

Brown, John S and Richard Adler, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0” Educause Review, Jan/Feb 2008.

Most of my Head for the Edge columns, updated and edited, can be found in my latest book. Buy it and I might be able to afford a nicer nursing home one day. Thank you.

Head for the Edge, Jan/Feb 2010

The best part about beating your head against a wall is that it feels so good when you stop.

Dear Superintendent Hookworm:           

Thank you for the opportunity to serve as a consultant on library and technology program assessment for your school district*.  I appreciate the candor of your staff when completing my surveys and answering my questions about your schools’ curriculum, methods, philosophy and mission. Your own interest in improving the library and technology programs is commendable.

I hope you recognize the challenge that today’s library consultant faces. Not many years ago a person doing this job could easily find state or national program standards with recommended definitive qualitative measures to be met: the square footage of library space, the size of the print collection, amount of student seating, type of instructional areas, ratio of computers to students, and FTE counts of professional, clerical and technical staff. But these numbers have grown increasingly meaningless as schools systemically commit to information and technology literacy skills taught in all classes, by all teachers.

Or choose not to.

My study confirms that your schools’ administrators and teachers:

• Are content to have their instruction be textbook and test-driven. Given the number of standards in the state-mandated curriculum and the state’s test-based accountability requirements, your staff does not see the need for in-depth study of topics, problem-based teaching, or authentic assessment. Textbooks are meeting the needs of your teaching staff.
• Are unconcerned about providing quality information sources to staff and students. Our findings indicate that your staff does not feel that edited sources of information – books, commercial databases, or reference materials - are necessary when “everything is free on the Internet.” Questions of information reliability and authority were deemed irrelevant.
• Believe students and staff can locate information without assistance. Citing the ability of students to do a search in Google and find pages of information on which the search terms appear, your staff dismissed the notion that more sophisticated strategies and search tools were needed. “Kids can always change their topic if they don’t find what they need with Google,” one teacher observed.
• Feel that the ability to process and communicate information in formats other than print is unnecessary. Students in your schools use standard written term papers as the sole means of communicating the results of research. That they are word-processed was cited as proof of “technology integration.” When asked about having students communicate using audio, video, photographic or visual productions, teachers dismissed these formats irrelevant to preparing students for college.
• Use computers only for testing and as online worksheets. Online testing and computer assisted instruction now uses approximately 75% of your schools’ computer labs’ schedule, leaving little opportunity for students to use the technology for creative work.
• View independent voluntary reading is a waste of time. Strict adherence to the basal readers and reading “skill building” software has resulted in students scoring acceptably on standardized tests. Both administration and teachers are reluctant to “mess with success.” Developing a desire to read is not part of the district’s strategic plan.
• Believe differentiated instruction is just babying the slackers. Providing materials at a variety of levels, in multiple formats meeting the needs of learners with divergent abilities, interests and learning styles was given a low priority by teachers in your schools.

Small classroom book collections that support the reading series and a word-processing lab with access to Google are all that your schools currently require. Since the skills of librarians and technology specialists are viewed as unimportant, the library can be staffed by clerks and by technicians who can keep the student information system running from a hidden location until it is outsourced.

I would really like to be able to confidently state a “Field of Dreams” model library and technology program philosophy: Build it and they will come. But we’re not talking mystical ball diamonds in Iowa cornfields here. Modern library facilities, technology and professional staff come at an expense that must be weighed against other possible efforts made to educate kids.

There is no sense building a baseball field if you are going to play ping-pong. And there is no sense putting a 21^st century library and technology program if you are only going to give kids a 20^th century education.

If at some time your school district decides it wants all its students to graduate having mastered a sophisticated set of IL/IT skills, having learned how to solve real problems creatively, and having experienced the power of global communications and collaboration, please contact me again.  In the meantime, save your taxpayers some money.

Oh, since the local private schools, charter schools, online schools and neighboring schools are seriously addressing 21^st century skills you may want to plan for declining enrollment.

Sincerely,

A. Consultant

*  This report is not based on any actual school, but an amalgam of many schools I’ve visited.

Most of my Head for the Edge columns, updated and edited, can be found in my latest book. Buy it and I might be able to afford a nicer nursing home one day. Thank you.

Head for the Edge, Nov/Dec 2009

When it comes to technology use in schools, every responsible educator’s first concern should be student safety. Therefore, we should immediately ban one of the most potentially harmful technologies now within our walls: the pencil. We must erase them from schools because:

• A student might use a pencil to poke out the eye of another student.
• A student might write a dirty word, a threatening note to another student, or test cheat sheet, with a pencil.
• One student might have a mechanical pencil, making those with wooden ones feel bad.
• The pencil might get stolen.
• Pencils break and need constant repair.
• Kids just use pencils to doodle instead of working on assignments or listening to the teacher.

I propose that congress take up legislation to protect our children right away. We could call the bill, “Just What’s the Point?”

These kind of questions drive me bonkers:

• Should we ban games from our library?
• Should we block social networking sites in our building?
• Should kids be allowed to access to video/audio streaming sites in our district?

Questions like that make about as much sense as asking:

• Should we be ban books from our libraries?
• Should we allow kids to have pencils and paper in our building?
• Should kids be allowed to watch DVDs in our district?

Why, when thinking about which resources schools give or ban student access, do adults so often start with format as opposed to the content of that format when determining appropriateness?

Banning a website based on the information’s container (game, social networking site, wiki, blog, or video stream) is as logical as saying, “Since Penthouse is published in a magazine format, we cannot allow students to read magazines in school.”

For some reason I’ve been asked a lot lately about gaming in school. I don’t know that much about games and haven’t been a big computer game player since Loderunner for the Apple IIe. But of course just because I am ignorant doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion (as with so many topics).  Here is my standard response: Let’s be clear that there are games and there are games — just like there are movies and there are movies; there are books and there are books. Games vary widely in type — from first person shoot em’ ups to skill attainment tutors with complex management programs. Games vary in taste, rating, maturity level, social values, and even factual accuracy. The question shouldn’t be “Do we permit students to play games?” but “Which games should we allow our students to play?”

Why are we as adults so ready to treat resources differently simply because of their format? It’s certainly faster to condemn an entire type of media or Internet site - none of that tedious, title-by-title evaluation. Administrators can be seen as Decisive. “Your children are now safe that we’ve blocked all social networking sites. And we oldies find these new fangled formats a little suspicious. “Hmmmm, microblogging – sure doesn’t sound like anything I would have done in my misbehavior-free childhood.”

Format bigotry, of course, extends beyond what is filtered on the Internet. Our adult prejudices against certain formats of entertainment, information and communication take many guises. You may be a format bigot if:

• You have different rules surrounding the checkout of videos and laptop computers than you do books.
• You allow voluntary free reading of books, but ban personal audio players with audio books.
• You believe reading novels is preferable to reading graphic novels.
• You accept research findings in print but not as a multimedia product.
• You ask kids to read something else when they’ve read one book multiple times, but you purchase movies just so you can watch them again and again.
• You require at least one “print’ reference in student research papers, but not at least one audiocast, video or blog reference.
• You allow, and even encourage kids come to the library to play chess on a chessboard, but not chess on a computer screen.

The chance of anyone who is reading this column is “literate” is pretty high. That is literate in the print sense anyway. Our own education focused on books, writing and oral communication. The chance of today’s educators being “media literate” is much lower. While we understand and respect the vocabulary, syntax and power of the written word, we are far less comfortable creating and learning from video, audio, and visual materials.

Forming an opinion of a resource based on its format makes about as much sense as forming an opinion about a person based on his ethnicity. We’ve got to get beyond format bigotry.

Kids have.



Most of my Head for the Edge columns, updated and edited, can be found in my latest book. Buy it and I might be able to afford a nicer nursing home one day. Thank you.

Head for the Edge, October/November 2009

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. Peter Drucker

You can’t do the right things unless you know how to do things right. - The Blue Skunk

I’ve been wondering a good deal lately about what seems to be a continuous round of recent political, economic, and educational disasters - the Iraq War, the handling of Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble, NCLB, the financial sector meltdown - and questioning whether it was a lack of leadership or poor management that either created or exacerbated such messes.

Examples abound:

• Removing an evil dictator and establishing a democracy in a Middle Eastern country - good vision, poor execution.
• Helping the victims of a natural disaster - good vision, poor execution.
• Increasing the number of people who own their own homes - good vision, poor execution.
• Assuring that all children have good reading and math skills - good vision, poor execution.
• Instilling public confidence in our financial institutions – good vision, poor execution. Well, to date anyway.

Quite frankly, I am getting a little tired of the emphasis on “leadership” and “vision” in society, and especially in education. For all the talk, all the theories, all the studies, and all the exhortations, this obsession is getting us nowhere - and good management is suffering as a result. Here are some deadly warning signs I’ve noticed lately…

• Education graduate schools replacing their “administration and management” classes with “leadership” classes.
• Professional organization’s standards becoming “visionary” documents instead of practical guidelines for effective programs.
• School administrators hired based on philosophy rather than track records of running schools well.
• “21^st Century Skills” student learning standards that are incomprehensible, unmeasurable, and unfocused.

I will state right up front that I am a better manager than “leader.” The workshops and writings of which I am most proud tend to be pragmatic rather than visionary. Budgeting, technology planning, policy-making, skills integration, effective staff development, and program evaluation are among my favorites. It’s pretty easy to sneer at practitioners sharing those “how-I-done-it-good” stories rather than academic research or high-blown theory. But those looking down their noses certainly aren’t the folks trying to make actual changes in a real library or school.

One of my favorite recipes for change is the simply stated formula: C = V X D X F > R. Richard Beckhard and David Gleicher posit that Change = Vision X Discontent X First steps > Resistance. I find in schools and libraries that some of these qualities are plentiful supply. Visionaries abound; discontent both from inside and outside schools is plentiful; and resistance is bred in the bone of more teachers than we’d like. The only things too often missing are those realistic first steps that move a program from someone’s dream to reality. What are the things that are doable today that actually result in change? And who helps teachers do them? That’s where good management comes in.

It’s pretty easy to say “all students must demonstrate 21^st century skills,” but it takes a manager to:

• Define those skills in concrete, measureable terms that real people can understand.
• Create grade-level benchmarks of those skills, scaffolded based on ability and age-appropriateness.
• Design thoughtful projects and activities that teach and reinforce such skills.
• Plan with curriculum designers to make sure such skills are embedded in all content areas.
• Collaborate with individual teachers in such a way that the librarian or technology integration specialist efforts are viewed as genuine support, rather than as annoying add-ons.
• Use assessment tools that don’t just measure student skill attainment, but help students actually master the skills as well.

Of course we need to be moving in a positive direction. (As a buddy of mine liked to say, “We may be lost, but we are making good time!”) A vision shared by your students, staff, administration, and parents is essential.

Let’s face it - anybody can create a “vision” and cry loudly about all the things that are wrong and paint a utopian view that sounds pretty good  - and it seems like almost everyone does. But what is usually lacking is any practical means of moving from Point A to Point B - especially within the parameters of working with real people, real budgets and a real number of hours in a day.

True genius is in finding ways to make a vision reality - working where the rubber hits the road. Pat a good manager on the back today. Without managers, visionaries are just hot air.

Most of my Head for the Edge columns, updated and edited, can be found in my latest book. Buy it and I might be able to afford a nicer nursing home one day. Thank you.

Head for the Edge, August/September 2009

“A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.” - Harold Fricklestein.”

Permit me a small personal indulgence. A few days ago I mailed in the manuscript for my new book, School Libraries Head for the Edge: Rants, Recommendations and Reflections, to the editors at Linworth Publishing. It is a collection of Head for the Edge columns from over the past fourteen years. As HFE begins it’s fifteenth year in this issue of LMC, I thought it fitting to share the introduction to the new book …

“Head for the Edge” first appeared in Linworth’s TECHNOLOGY CONNECTION magazine, a predecessor to LIBRARY MEDIA CONNECTION, in February of 1995. The title of the first column was “Making Change Work for You.” It was about 800 words, one page long. I’ve written about 80,000 more words for the column in the following years.

These columns have been written, I’ll admit, for a rather selfish reason. It is through writing that I reflect, distill, organize and understand what is happening in my professional life. Being a reflective practitioner, the experts say, is a good thing. You could call these columns my “pre-blog blog.”

Readers of this column have been generous with comments, criticisms, and praise. It’s the rare conference I attend or week of e-mail that goes by that someone doesn’t say, “When reading LIBRARY MEDIA CONNECTION I always turn to the last page first.” Since I do exactly that with a number of magazines, I find it high praise indeed. Compliments are a strange combination of both ego gratification and satisfaction in knowing one has helped another person. Thanks to all who have offered them.

A few observations about writing this column:

1. It was a delight to work with editor Carol Simpson for most of the years I have been writing. She’s a wonderful editor, a respected professional librarian, and an all-round class act. In 2008, the esteemed Gail Dickinson took the editorial reins. So far, so good, but I am keeping a close eye on her.
2. One of my guilty pleasures is re-reading my old columns. Other than wincing at an overuse of exclamation points, I still get tickled reading my own stuff. Much like the author himself, I like to think, they seem to be aging quite gracefully. My wife thinks it’s sick.
3. I am struck by the lack of humor in most professional writing. Too many writers feel that in order to be taken seriously, they must always be serious. This is a mistake. We too often forget that in order to connect with another person intellectually, you have to connect emotionally as well.
4. The profession needs more writers who are willing to tackle our sacred cows. The best writing I’ve done is that which has kicked up the most dust. My dad used to say that opinions are like, well, a certain anatomical feature – everybody has one. We’re all doing practice-based research every day we do our jobs. More people to need to share their knowledge and opinions.
5. Most of my columns are about opportunities embedded in the problems we face. We need to start looking for opportunities rather than complaining when something new comes on the educational scene. I certainly have my doubts about many of the educational “silver bullets du jour.” But I have also felt unprofessional knowing that I have also been a willing keeper of the dirty little secret that our schools continue to graduate students who are unprepared for life. We should stop complaining, and start figuring our place in an era of educational accountability.
6. The librarian will always be the sole determining factor of quality of the library program. I’ve yet to see a great program run by a mediocre professional or a good professional that could not make significant improvements under the worst conditions. We are impatient, we hold ourselves to incredibly high standards, and we dream big. Those aren’t bad things, but we also need to remember that our greatest accomplishments are when we improve, even a little, the life of an individual student. Providing that one book that was “just right,” that one piece of illusive information, or that one life-long skill may have longer lasting ramifications than all the formal lessons we’ve planned or taught.
7. And finally, I will once again beat that same old drum – either we take responsibility for the technology in our lives and schools and master it and use it and be seen as the experts by others or we will be replaced by professionals who will.

I believe that the school library field has a bright and fascinating future. Remember, the one thing your library has that the Internet never will is YOU!

Most of my Head for the Edge columns, updated and edited, can be found in my latest book. Buy it and I might be able to afford a nicer nursing home one day. Thank you.

Doug Johnson <doug0077@gmail.com>
Multimedia & Internet @ Schools, July/August 2009

“… the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Steven Jobs

Next time you wander an airplane’s aisles, do a quick scan over the shoulders of your fellow passengers. What are they doing?

If your observations are similar to mine, well over 50% of air travelers are listening to portable music devices, playing games on handhelds, working on presentations or spreadsheets using laptop computers, or watching video on diminutive players. Paper book and magazine readers are in the minority.

Any number of recent studies are concluding that reading is declining – primarily the reading of novels and longer works of nonfiction¹. Pundits are remarking that online reading is changing their personal reading behaviors.² As the Job’s quote above suggests, we are rapidly becoming a postliterate society.

Wikipedia describes a postliterate society as one  “wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary.”  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliterate_society> (Aug 10, 2008)

I would modify that definition and define the postliterate as those who can read, but choose to meet their primary information and recreational needs through audio, video, graphics and gaming. Print for the postliterate is relegated to brief personal messages, short informational needs, and other functional, highly pragmatic uses such as instructions, signage and time-management device entries – each often highly supplemented by graphics. The postliterate’s need for extended works or larger amounts of information is met through visual and/or auditory formats.³

Postliteracy is impacting books. How many citizens - already manga and illustrated novel fans - learned about last year’s presidential candidates from <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/07/mccain-and-obam.html> The introduction to Google’s browser, Chrome, was released as a comic book <http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html>. The Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain published it copyright guide Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law as a graphic novel. <http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/>

While many adults exhibit postliterate behaviors, the “Net Generation” is its poster child. And the poster child of the Net Gens is Jeremy from the popular comic strip Zits.  The panel appearing on August 20, 2008 was illuminating. Jeremy is asked by his mother if he’s “through” his summer reading list. Jeremy replies:

“Get though as in ‘read”…  as in look at every page and comprehend its meaning…or ‘read’ as in flip through the first chapter and plan to Google a synopsis the night before school starts?”

Like many young adults (and an increasing number of older ones, Jeremy exhibits episodic reading behaviors.

The term “postliterate library” may at first glance appear an oxymoron. But it is not. Our best libraries are already postliterate, increasingly meeting the needs of users who communicate, play and learn using media other than print. And the attitudes we as professional librarians adopt toward the postliterate may well determine whether our libraries continue to exist.

Education and librarianship has a current bias toward print. This communication/ information format has served civilization well for a couple millennia. Most professionals now demonstrate high levels of proficiency in print literacy skills and they can be expected to defend the necessity of such skills vociferously. Most of my fellow professionals are in the same straights that I find myself - a competent reader, writer and print analyst but neophyte video, audio and graphic producer, consumer and critic. And it is human nature to be dismissive of those competencies that we ourselves lack.

But I would argue that postliteracy is a return to more natural forms of multi-sensory communication - speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multi-media formats.

Libraries, especially those that serve children and young adults, need to acknowledge that society is becoming postliterate. These are some critical attributes of a library that serves a postliterate (PL) clientele:

10.  PL librarians recognize the legitimacy of non-print resources, and promote their use without bias.

While I recognize this may look frightening, even culturally destructive, to many of us “print-bound” professionals, we cannot ignore the society of which we are a part and are charged with supporting. Culture determines library programs; libraries transmit culture.

School libraries are often the bellwether programs in their schools. If we as librarians support and use learning resources that are meaningful, useful and appealing to our students, so might the classroom teacher.

In Phaedrus, Plato decries an “alternate” communication technology:

The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves.

The Greek philosopher was, of course, dissing the new “technology” of his day: writing.  Plato might well approve of our return to an oral tradition – in its digital forms. But his quote also demonstrates that sometimes our greatest fears become our greatest blessings.

_________________________________

1. These include:

National Endowment for the Arts  “Reading at Risk” report, 2004 <www.arts.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf>
Michael Rogers “What is the worth of word? Will it matter if people can’t read in the future?”  <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14823087/from/ET/>

2. These include:

Naomi Baron  “Killing the written word by snippets” (Los Angles Times, Nov 28, 2005) http://articles.latimes.com/2005/nov/28/opinion/oe-baron28
Mark Baurlein The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)
Nicholas Carr “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
Maggie Jackson Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.
Lee Siegel Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.
Motoko Rich “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? New York Times, July 27, 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?ref=education>

3. Postliteracy differs from aliteracy in that the demand for information and new learning is present, only met in other means than print. Aliteracy simply means choosing not to read.



Self-evaluation Rubrics for Basic Administrative Technology Use, 2010

I. Personal Productivity (NETS-A 2009 - 3c, 4e)

Level One: I rarely use a computer or other information technology, assigning technology-enabled professional record-keeping and communication to my office staff. I am not aware of or have interest in learning about using a computer, smartphone or other digital communication and information access device.

Level Two: I use a computer to keep a calendar to which my secretary has access; to track addresses and phone numbers of professional contacts; and to compose professional correspondence. I use technology to do routine tasks more effectively and efficiently, which gives me more time for work with staff and on long-term goals and major projects. I can access my calendar and other information remotely using a portable communication device and web-access.

Level Three: I not only use technology to increase my productivity, but encourage my office staff to do so as well. All correspondence from my school looks professional. All building/district staff use a shared calendar system for easy scheduling of meetings and shared document creation applications for collaborative work. Our school has nearly a paperless work flow, providing both economic and ecological benefits.

II. Student Information Systems Use (NETS-A 2009 - 4b. 4e)

Level  One: My office uses a student information system to accurately track student information including parental contact information, grade reports, discipline reports, and health records. The system is used to build a master class schedule. Selected building personnel and I can access the system through the network and use it for decision-making purposes. The system is secure and back-up procedures are in place. 

Level Two: Appropriate student information is used by all staff as well as by building leaders. Teachers are trained and proficient in its use. The system is integrated with a district census database that is also tied to finance, transportation, and personnel/payroll records. I know the philosophy of SIF (School Interoperability Framework) and use it as a criterion when selecting new or upgraded information systems. The district information plan has these attributes:

•  
  • record and maintain basic student contact information including address, parent-guardian information, and telephone information
  • track student attendance
  • record and maintain student course grades, credits and completion of other graduation requirements
  • calculate grade point averages and class rank
  • create transcripts
  • maintain discipline records
  • develop class schedules, register students for classes, and create class lists
  • maintain student health records
  • generate reports
  • generate report cards, progress reports, letters to parents and mailing labels

Level Three: The information system is used as a communication tool to inform parents/guardians and students of real-time student work reporting. Using a secure portal, parents/guardians and students themselves can access demographic data, attendance, grades, schedules and gradebook infomation including test scores, quizzes and daily work completion information. The data in the student information system is used with telephone calling and e-mailing systems to communicate with households. The system integrates with state reporting systems and with data warehousing/data mining programs.

III. Record Keeping and Budgeting (NETS-A 2009 - 3a)

Level One:             I use and prefer a paper system, a spreadsheet or simple packaged record keeping system to track my department or building’s budget accounts. It is accurate and kept up-to-date. I can use my accounting system to cross check the district’s financial system if discrepancies arise.

Level Two: I use the district’s online accounting system to track my budget accounts. I can submit purchase orders electronically. I use networked inventory databases to keep track of my building’s textbooks, supplies, and equipment.

Level Three: I give access to the accounts I manage to anyone interested in the spirit of transparency. I use shared budgeting tools that allow a collaborative budgeting process working with a wide range of stakeholders.

IV. Data Use  (NETS-A 2009 - 4b, 4c)

Level One: I do not use, or have available to me, reports or data produced by information systems in the district to help make operational or policy decisions.

Level Two: I can analyze census, discipline, scheduling, attendance, grading, and financial data reports produced by administrative systems to spot trends and highlight problems in my building or department. I can communicate the conclusions to staff, parents, and the community in understandable ways. I help my staff access, analyze and use student performance data to design instructional strategies. I have the statistical knowledge to make meaningful and accurate judgements based on data.

Level Three: I recognize areas in administration for which additional data is needed for the efficient and effective operation of the building, department, or district and can make recommendations about how that data can be gathered, stored, and processed electronically. I can use data mining techniques to draw conclusions about programs’ effectiveness and use such data to create building plans and evaluated their success.

V.  Communications and Public Relations (NETS-A, 2009 - 3c, 5d)

Level One:  I ask that my secretary word-process out-going communications. When I speak to the public, I use overhead transparencies or no audio-visual aids. I do not have a professional online presence.

Level Two: I effectively use a variety of technologies to communicate with students, teachers, parents, and the public. I have an e-mail address, check my e-mail on a regular basis, and communicate with building and district staff using e-mail. When speaking, I can use presentation software and the necessary hardware to effectively communicate my message. I use the district’s cable television capabilities for public information uses in the school and community. I have presence on the district’s website that is current and useful to students, staff, parents and the community. I can use the mass calling and e-mail systems in our district to notify the public of events and emergencies.

Level Three: I communicate online using a variety of technologies - blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, microblogging and emerging technologies. I contribute policy advice for our school’s web pages. I encourage my staff to use technology to communicate with each other, students, parents, and the public. The public is encouraged to communicate electronically with the school. I understand the powerful impression that my school’s online presence can play in the public perception of the school and can use online tools for recruiting and keeping students.

VI.  Online Research, and Professional Development, and Personal Learning Networks (NETS-A 2009 - 2d, 3b, 3d)

Level One: I prefer not to use online resources to gather professional information or research nor do I use technology to communciate with my peers to share information.

Level Two:  I can effectively search and extract information from online resources such as educational journal databases, ERIC, and other credible sources on the Internet. I subscribe to electronic journals and newsletters of professional relevance. I subscribe to electronic mailing lists (listservs) and blogs to gather information and problem solve with fellow professionals. I have participated in educational forums or training delivered via satellite, ITV or online.

Level Three:  I use technology remain actively engaged in an on-going professional learning community of fellow professionals.

VII. Teacher Technology Competencies (NETS-A 2009 - 3a, 4c)

Level One:  I cannot specifically identify any specific skills teachers in my school or district should have in order to use technology effectively. My school or district has no written set of technology skill competencies for teachers.

Level Two:  Our school or district has a set of technology skills that teachers are expected to master correlated to the NETS-T or other national standards. A formal staff development program that offers teachers a range of staff development opportunities in technology and a means for assessing the effectiveness of those opportunities is in place. The effective use of technology in supporting all teaching improvement efforts is recognized and addressed in staff development initiatives.

Level Three:  All teachers are expected to use technology to increase their pedagogical effectiveness and integrate high-level technology uses into their classes when appropriate.

XIII. Student Technology Competencies (NETS-A, 2009 - 2a)

Level One:  I cannot identify any specific skills students in my school or district should have in order to use technology effectively after graduation to be successful students, workers or citizens.

Level Two:  My district has a well-articulated and well-taught information literacy curriculum that integrates technology into a problem-solving research process. I help assure that my school has a librarian who provide instruction to both students and staff in these skills. Students have a wide variety of opportunities in all classes to practice the use of technology in meaningful ways. Benchmarks for student technology proficiency are written and understood by the staff and public. Our curriculum is based on national standards such as NETS or AASL’s Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning.

Level Three:  I serve on curriculum committees comprised of both educators and community leaders that help identify the skills and competencies future graduates will need to successfully participate in society. I can clearly articulate how technology use impacts student achievement.

IX. Envisioning, Planning, and Leading (NETS-A, 2009 - 1a, 1b. 1c)

Level One:  I let others in my district or school create technology plans. We purchase equipment, software, and technical support on an as-needed basis.

Level Two: I use software to facilitate brainstorming activities, to plan and conduct meetings, and to create decision-making models. I take an active leadership role in building and district technology planning efforts helping make decisions about hardware selection and acquisition, staff development in technology, and integration of technology into the curriculum. Our school and district have a long-range plan and short-term goals for technology use that are regularly assessed and updated. I have a personal philosophy I can articulate regarding the use of technology in education.

Level Three:  I have a leadership role in my professional organization that stresses the effective use of technology in education. I write and speak for my fellow practitioners on technology issues. I work to inspire others to use technology when it supports best practices in education.

X.  Ethical Use, Student Safety and Policy Making (NETS-A, 2009 - 5a, 5b, 5c)

Level One:  I do not feel I need to be concerned with any ethical, safety, or policy issues surrounding computer use.

Level Two:  I  understand copyright and fair use issues as they apply to information technology resources. I demonstrate ethical usage of all software and let my staff know my personal stand on legal and moral issues involving technology. I know and enforce the school’s technology policies and guidelines, including its Internet Acceptable Use Policy. I am aware of the issues as technology relates to student safety and security and the physical health and environmental risks associated with technology use. I have a personal philosophy I can articulate regarding the use of technology in education.

Level Three: I am aware of other value-laden aspects of technology use including data privacy, equitable access, and free speech issues. I can speak to a variety of technology issues at my professional association meetings, to parent groups, and to the general community. I encourage all staff members in all classes to address the issues of safe and responsible use of technology and the Internet.

Doug Johnson
dougj@doug-johnson.com

From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films, and 100 billion Web pages…When fully digitized the whole lot could be compressed…onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet – if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.) – Kevin Kelly “Scan This Book,” New York Times, May 14, 2006

Chances are an increasing share of your library’s materials budget is shifting to digital resources every year. Popular educational reference book publishers are publishing e-books and online databases. If you are adding a new encyclopedia next year, you are likely to consider an online version. And your teachers may well be using more instructional films from a streaming video source than from your VHS/DVD collection. And we know our “net gen” students prefer their information in bytes rather than pages.

Learning to intelligently manage these intangible items is increasingly important.

When we talk about the management of print and physical audiovisual resources, tasks and procedures can be organized into the following, semi-chronological, areas: 

1. Needs assessment/collection development
2. Selection
3. Acquisition
4. Promotion and display
5. Cataloging, circulation and control
6. Inventory
7. Evaluation

And each of these resource management tasks is applicable to digital resources. But online resources have unique characteristics that make working with them quite different than the books, magazines and AV materials we’ve managed in the past. And I’m sure you’ve already encountered some of those differences.

First, let’s identify what digital resources need to be managed. Most of today’s school library media centers have most if not all these resources: (For the purposes of this article I am listing only those items that have a purchase or subscription cost.)

• Online databases such as full text periodicals (Ebsco, ProQuest, InfoTrac)
• Online reference sources (ABC-CLIO, Facts on File, HW Wilson, Worldbook Online, Encyclopedia Britannica Online)
• Streaming video collections (United Streaming, PowerMediaPlus)
• Commercial search engines (Nettrekker. C.E.R.F)
• E-books (Thomson Gale, NetLibrary, Follett)
• Online tutorial services (Atomic Learning)
• Software licenses for productivity and curriculum programs (Microsoft Office, Inspiration, Accelerated Reader)

1. Needs assessment/collection development

Unless you have an unlimited budget, your digital resources must be selected to meet the needs of your school, its curricula, and teachers. Long gone are the days of the “balanced” school library media center collection where collection building meant having something available on every possible topic. While general reference sources are still needed, the “free” Internet, interlibrary loan, and local public and academic libraries give students access to a rounded set of materials.

Many states also purchase general resources for all libraries, public, school, academic, and special, to use. A first question to ask in a needs assessment is “What do I need in addition to the resources provided by my state?” Some state collections are amazingly comprehensive. Familiarity with these resources is a must for every LMS for their collection development process.

The LMS can concentrate on building a collection based on specific needs down to course, unit and even project level. Just as there is little sense in acquiring books on a topic that is not part of a curriculum or meets a reading program goal, there is no sense in selecting a subject-specific database for a subject not researched in your school. And traditional needs assessment methods can be used to determine areas of need in your collection.

Increasingly the question about meeting those needs centers around whether digital or print resources are best suited to meeting them. How will your students and staff get the biggest “bang for the buck?” In making that choice, you need to ask a few questions:

• How timely does this resource need to be?
• How much access to computers or e-book readers do your users have in the LMC, in the rest of the school, in their homes and in the community?
• What resources do your users seem to enjoy using the most? Studies of our “net generation” students indicate they have a definite preference for digital resources.
• How important is accessibility to this information from outside the school? For multiple users to have access at one time?

The “right” choice will depend on your own demographics and resources. While both you and your users may prefer a digital encyclopedia, if there are only a very few workstations in your library on which one might be accessed, the print version is still a better choice.

2. Resource selection

Just like choosing a print resource, good selection procedures need to be followed, including knowing the board selection policy and using unbiased review sources when making a selection. I believe good reviews and comparisons are more difficult to find for electronic resources than for traditional ones. Given the changeable nature of online resources, reviews may no longer reflect the actual product (a full-text periodical database may have added or dropped titles, change years of back issues, etc.)

One method of reviewing online resources, however, is available that is not traditionally used with print materials: the trial subscription. You and you patrons can use the product from 14 to 60 days before deciding whether to subscribe or purchase it. “Before I spend money on a database I try to have at least one teacher use it with their students. If there are glitches or the instructions/process is unclear – the problem will usually show up quickly. And by using this method we can also gauge if the literacy level/instructional level of the information is on par with the level of the students.”  Gary Schwartz, LMS from Owatonna (MN) High School advises.

Another important review challenge is that many digital resources tend to be collections of materials, not distinct titles. It is one thing to purchase a DVD title; quite another to select an entire collection of educational videos. This makes a review imperative since a hands-on, eyes-on examination of every title is impractical if not impossible. It’s also a good time to review a basic selection precept that we include materials based on their strengths rather than censor them based on a small percentage of material that may be objectionable. Mary Alice Anderson, LMS for Winona Schools reports:

Had an interesting experience with purchasing a health database.  The LMSs previewed it and asked counselors, health teachers and a couple others to look at it, too. People liked it.  But one administrator questioned placing content like that on the web site because there are students whose parents don’t let them attend classes in topics such as sex ed.   I explained we buy databases to steer kids into good content instead of whatever they find n their own via Google. I saw that as another example of how we need to be continually educating administrators.

Additional considerations are operating system compatibility (less problematic with web-based materials), bandwidth and storage capacity necessary. Some companies (Digital Curriculum, for example) will allow a school to house the product’s digital content onsite so that only wide area network or in-building network capacity is a factor, not bandwidth to the Internet itself. When the medium being accessed is comprised of large files, like video programs, this is an important factor in selecting a resource, but the server on which the material is stored may need to be very large. With the purchase of materials that are meant to be a permanent part of the collection (e-books, perhaps) there is the question of how accessible such materials will in future years as programs, operating systems and storage media change. (Tried to read any files created on an Apple IIe lately?)

And finally, we also need to recognize that the resource interface, not just its contents, needs to be age appropriate. Happily, many companies recognize that younger users need less sophisticated search tools, larger icons, and brighter images.

3. Acquisition

Getting the resource should be as easy as entering a URL – right? Not quite.

Giving a school’s users access means working with your IT department in most cases and selection must be done in coordination with it. One decision to be made, when the option is available, is whether to give access to an online resource by password, by IP address or both.

If access is given by IP address, patrons at any computer within a range of IP numbers do not need a username or password to log on. The product recognizes the IP number as one in an organization that has purchased the product. This is convenient and reduces the amount of work needed to track usernames and passwords and is fairly secure method of limiting access only to licensed users. Access by username and password has advantages as well. Control can be given to only select users to certain materials; users may have access to individual areas where they can store results of searches or play lists; users can get access to the resource from computers outside the school’s IP range (without having to set up a proxy); and usage can be tracked more precisely. If access is given by individual rather than generic username and password, I would strongly suggest working with your IT department to set up an database, such as an LDAP directory, where usernames and passwords can be stored and used for authentication in multiple applications.

Home access is an important factor we consider when our district selects a resource. The movement is toward 24/7 learning and making sure learning resources are available 24/7 is important. Online courses and hybrid classes will continue to demand access to good digital materials since a students may not be near the physical library for extended periods of time.

One management/budgeting tip is to make sure your subscriptions begin and end when your school fiscal year begins and ends. Most companies will work with you to bill your district for a partial year or, more likely, a year plus the months needed to end the subscription at the end of your school year.

4. Promotion and display

How do you educate kids (and teachers) to use authoritative online sources and not just “Google it?” How do you teach your users to see the library as a portal to trusted sources? Online resources do not jump out at students and staff and holler “use me” anymore than library books ever did. They need to be promoted and displayed.

Library orientation programs must of course demonstrate online resources as well as the physical ones. Introduction to online resource is best done during research units themselves – when students actually need the information they contain. Any bibliography or webquest prepared for a unit should reference electronic tools as well as those in print. As LMS Jaime Jeanne Meadows St. Helens (OR) High School puts it, “The piece of the puzzle that I try to add is instruction.  When I get a new “toy” I like to show the staff how to use it, hopefully during an in-service day, and then if it’s a student use item, show them how to use it on a case by case or class by class basis.”

LMC webpages should clearly mark links to their digital resources, either on the homepage or on a separated page that has a clear link from the homepage. A note by the link that tells the user any special instructions for accessing the resource not only helps the user, but will cut down questions. Oh, posting a generic username and password on a public website, no matter how convenient, is not appropriate.

Students and teachers can be subtly reminded of the schools’ online resources if guides in the form of posters are visible near workstations. These resources need to be promoted at teacher meetings and in teacher newsletters. The LMC’s webpage with links to its digital resources should be the default page when any web browser is launched.

Just because it doesn’t fit in a display case, doesn’t mean you can’t make it visible.

5. Cataloging, circulation and control

Should digital resources be cataloged? Well, of course. Follett’s eBooks come with MARC records. Online reference materials should found when doing a catalog search just like their print cousins. When feasible, the ability to search digital resource using a federated search tool must be made available.

Few electronic resources circulate per se. Multiple users can access them all at one time – a major advantage of these tools.

E-books are the exception to this rule. Follett and NetLibrary allow only single users to access titles with libraries determining “circulation” length as they would with any print resource. The specific rights for e-book use vary not only from supplier to supplier, but from publisher to publisher within suppliers’ lists. This includes whether a title can be accessed by multiple users, can be downloaded and read by portable devices, and can be printed. NetLibrary suggests that most users treat their e-books as a reference source with an average use time of 35 minutes. Supplying digital materials like e-books, may require the circulation of portable devices on which to read the materials such as e-book readers or digital audio players. When a single digital device may hold multiple items (one e-book reader with a dozen titles on it), counting circulation will become very tricky. Good luck with that.

Regular checks to see if right users have the access are important, as is checking the resources’ links from the LMC’s webpage to make sure they are working. As Australian librarian Margaret Dennerley opines, with tongue in cheek, “One really cool thing our IT department does is change our external IP ranges without advising us and without thinking it might have an impact on our patrons being able to access those sites that are IP authenticated.”

6. Inventory

Counting subscriptions is usual pretty simple to account for since they aren’t very numerous and impossible to steal, even by ingenious 8^th graders.

Tracking licenses of software that is installed on computer workstations is more problematic – making sure that your school is not running more copies of an application than for which it holds a license. Our district, to help stay in compliance, runs a remote survey of all computers to get a list of licensed program files on each. These lists are then compared to licenses for which we hold records, and if any unlicensed software is found, our department takes action. Limiting the rights for installing software also helps keep licenses from stretching too broadly. Oh, we like purchasing site licenses for products when possible. It is not only economical, but helps save the hassle of inventorying the product on individual computers.

Do keep good records of your licenses and subscriptions. It may not be possible totally stop software pirating, but your district needs to show it has made a good faith effort to do so.

7. Evaluation

Most vendors of digital information make it possible to track the usage of their products. It is, after all, in their own best interests to have LMSs and their administrators know just how heavily a resource is being used. A typical report might look something like this (from TeachingBooks.net):

Statistics for Johnson Elementary School, March 2007:

2786 pages turned since the start of your license.

229 pages turned in the past month.

28 sessions in the main section of TeachingBooks in the past month.

8 sessions in the Educator Area of TeachingBooks in the past month.

36 total sessions in all of TeachingBooks in the past month.

 Target use figures can be established with resources meeting those targets retained, and those not getting the required use, dropped.

Usage analysis such as listed above provides data on the volume of use but does nothing to show how useful your users found the resource. If you base your decision to subscribe purely on transaction logs you are not getting the full picture. You need to combine log analysis with other forms of evaluation such as citation analysis and exit interviews done at the end of major products and student/staff surveys that ask about the importance of these resources.

I would recommend that the decision to keep or terminate a subscription to many of these products not be done the first or even every year. It often takes several years before teachers and students discover a resource. And a danger of switching content providers is that you might turn some teachers off using them if the links in their lesson plans to those resources need to be changed every year. Evaluate – cautiously.

The practice of effective analog resource management has developed over many years – even centuries. But the rapid pace of transition from print to digital resource does not allow today’s LMS the luxury of a slow transition. We need to develop, test and share best practices with each other rapidly. After all, today’s kids are asking “what’s taking so long?”