Search

In the rapidly changing globalized world, school librarians cannot prepare today's students for every possible outcome, but they can give them the skills that will make them adaptable in 21st-century learning and work settings. The mission for school library programs is to ensure that students are effective users of ideas and information by being critical thinkers, enthusiastic readers, skillful researchers, and ethical users of information. School librarians, through their leadership, translate this mission statement into practice by engaging students in meaningful learning experiences, providing access to materials in a variety of formats, and instilling a love of reading. A love of reading is just as essential to the future development of students as showing them how to research and manage information. Evidence from statewide studies has demonstrated that test scores correlated positively and statistically significantly with strong school library reading programs. Unfortunately, reading books for pleasure, in terms of volume and enjoyment among adolescents, seems to be on the decline. A larger spotlight on reading, and why it's enjoyable, needs to be turned on. To do that, school librarians need to answer the question: What are some of the exciting and innovative ways of instilling in students a love of reading that school library programs ought to lead? Addressing this question was the main focus of ReadReviewRecommend, a program that was created and carried out with middle school students in an urban secondary school in Los Angeles. Designed to be a safe and welcoming library program that provides expert guidance and allows students to choose what they want to read, ReadReviewRecommend connected reading and writing with widely popular social media and mobile devices, and made reading exciting and meaningful across different levels of reading comprehension, individual preferences, and technological competencies.

This exploratory study reports on what engineering undergraduate students know and would like to learn about engineering information sources and access. Responses were obtained on selected performance measures within the framework of "Information Literacy Standards for Science and Engineering/Technology" (ACRL/ALA/STS 2006). The results are based on 70 sophomores who completed a four-page paper-and-pencil questionnaire on April 4, 2008 at UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The paper discusses implications of this study's findings in light of engineering education in general, and specifically with regard to instructing all engineering students in the proper use of a variety of pathways in accessing high quality engineering resources for numerous lifelong purposes. (Contains 1 table.)

Marlborough School, which was founded in 1889 in Los Angeles, is an independent college preparatory day school for young women. When the author arrived in Marlborough School in 2005, she found that the school was an exciting place to learn but the library was not. However, head of school Barbara Wagner described her vision of the school's future library as a Starbucks, an inspiring image that resonated with the school's intellectual culture and appealed to the author immediately. This article describes how the author and her colleagues planned for the renovation of their school library. Prior to finalizing their plans, she and her colleagues compiled the suggestions made by their students and their faculty. Their responses and wishes, rather than the advice of interior designers, architects, and landscape experts, were implemented without a dime, into SALON@marlborough. (SALON stands for Sense-Making Approach to Learning through Open Access Networking.) (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Discussion of educational partnerships between educational levels focuses on collaborative work between a high school physics teacher and a high school librarian that included science-integrated information literacy competencies that may be expanded for higher education. Suggests further study and a crossover between information literacy standards for secondary schools and colleges. (Author/LRW)

To assist engineering students to "view" and access online engineering information sources in a layered manner, Engineering Information Sources and Access (EISA) was developed. Discussed are design features of EISA's front-end, ATEIS. The level of interoperability was compared across four controlled vocabularies on selected terms for targeted user populations. (AEF)

Describes design considerations of two interrelated programs that together make LEArning Portfolio (LEAP) prototype system for accessing engineering information for engineers. The two programs are: Engineering Information Sources and Access (EISA), implemented as a Web-based self-learning prototype system; and Information Sources that Every Engineer should Know (ISEEK). (AEF)

Focuses on information literacy (IL), specifically the design of a college course and its high school version intended to equip students with essential IL skills. Discusses current problems in information seeking that correspond to each of the phases of the information life cycle: asking a question, accessing and retrieving information, evaluating, keeping relevant items, and putting them to use. (AEF)

Discusses five different shifts that characterize the transitional nature of today's libraries and examines the extent to which college students agree in interpreting the term, "library use." Findings suggest that the notion of the library as a "space" is better agreed upon than the notion of the library as a "store" or "service." (Author/AEF)

Describes the techniques used to elicit personal knowledge on cartographic cataloging from experts to develop an experimental semiautomatic cataloging advisor called Mapper. Results of an evaluation study are reported which demonstrate that library students who are novice map catalogers produce better cataloging answers when assisted by Mapper. (33 references) (MES)

Describes a study designed to evaluate the performance of an experimental semiautomatic map cataloging advisor, Mapper, in the descriptive cataloging of single-sheet maps from U.S. publishers. Hypotheses tested are discussed, treatment of experimental and control groups is described, and it is reported that Mapper helped produce better cataloging results. (120 references) (LRW)

Describes the design of an experimental computer-aided cataloging advisor, Mapper, that was developed to help novice users with the descriptive cataloging of single-sheet maps from U.S. publishers. The human-computer interface is considered, the use of HyperCard is discussed, the knowledge base is explained, and assistance screens are described. (54 references) (LRW)

Results of this exploratory study suggested engaging students in digital image tagging can have analytical and educational importance. The study was designed to gauge middle school students' capacities to describe digital images from two digital libraries that they used in an information literacy activity. When describing the image attributes, students (N=81) freely chose single words and multiword phrases to describe the interpretations, feelings, and questions evoked by the images. These descriptors were used to derive conceptual categories for the seventeen digital images. Results demonstrated that students acknowledged the responsibility of indexers to choose index terms for objects in collections that enable identification, organization and retrieval. The study sheds light on the potential to improve age-appropriate access to images by means of offering a multi-tiered approach to image representation. It also introduces a transparent approach to teaching information literacy concepts through creative thinking about the meaning of resources and their relationship in a broader information cycle context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have just begun to acknowledge the importance of incorporating the component of human-computer interaction in the design of online information systems. With the advent of interactive computer systems designed for direct use by the general public, the need has become apparent to design "friendly" user interfaces. In this regard, online public access calalogs, OPACs, are no exception. Recent research studies of OPAC users have found that (i) subject access in online catalogs is coming to be valued at least as much as known item access, and that (ii) OPAC users have a number of serious difficulties with subject searching. Consequently, we need to understand what characterizes human-computer compatibility and to examine various means of assisting the OPAC user at the heart of online searching tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]