Nice VLE, Shame About the Library

My visit to the Online Information Conference recently reminded me, yet again, what a marvellous bunch of people librarians are. If you really want to know about searching for information and making connections, aska  librarian.

I'll be exploring such matters in the (hopefully) near future, but in the meantime I thought I'd reproduce an article I wrote this time last year. Don't worry: although the news referred to is old, the principles are still relevant, and I've updated the article.

Libraries are still relevantLast week it was reported that a school in England has decided to dispense with its library, and its librarian, and have an all-encompassing virtual learning environment (VLE) instead.

It probably isn't the first school to do something like this, and no doubt will not be the last. But is the decision a good one from an educational point of view?

I have to say that, in my experience school librarians are the salt of the earth. Their role is traditionally similar to, but different from, that of their counterparts in public libraries. That is because, as well as being founts of knowledge when it comes to finding stuff, the good ones could save a teacher an incredible amount of time.

For example, in a few schools in which I've taught, the school librarian has invited staff to share their schemes of work with her (they are usually female in my experience) so that she can put together "project boxes" for the teacher.

A typical project box would contain a couple of dozen books on the topic, possibly even a few artifacts, and a list of follow-up reading. It therefore provided a very rich extra resource for the classroom for that half-term.

Now, in case you think I must be harking back to the pre-industrial age, I should tell you that I availed myself of this service several times as Head of ICT in a secondary school. I always felt it important that students know that not everything they want to find out needs to be looked for on the internet.

I also wanted them to understand the concept of triangulation, ie corroborating one set of "facts" with another set found in a different source. When you have in your classroom a box containing twelve or so very different books, as well as access to the web, this idea becomes much more transparent.

But even in traditional terms, you can't beat a good librarian. For a start, I have met very few teachers who are as good at searching for information (and finding it!) as the average librarian: librarians seem to understand the concept of "search" in a much deeper and more innate way than the rest of us.

You also cannot beat a librarian who is really at the top of his or her game. The chief librarian in my local library, some years ago now, was amazing. You could go up to him in at the desk in the reference section and say:

"I'm doing a report on butterflies in history, with particular reference to yellow butterflies in Denmark in the 16th century"

and he would say something like:

"Ah yes, you will need Cooper's History of Scandinavian Insects, but you may also like to check out the November 2001 issue of the Journal of the Moths and Butterfly Research Association".

Interestingly, one of the speakers at the conference, Paul Sonderegger, likened the traditional librarian to an interactive flow chart. This is shown in the illutsration below, which represents how the librarian responds when someone asks "Do you have anything by an Irish writer?".

What the librarian does

Finally, I happen to think that folksonomy isn't everything. Taxonomy is important too, and whilst I cannot claim to know the Dewey Decimal systems, I can claim to understand how it works, and the numbers of the type of book in which I am most interested. Where will students gain that kind of knowledge, easily, once school libraries and their custodians start to disappear.

Look at this blog for an article about the school referred to at the start of this article, along with references to newspaper reports on the matter.

See also: 7 Reasons to have an educational technology library

7 Reasons to have an educational technology library

In my many visits to schools I have rarely seen a book library which has been built up and maintained by the teachers resposible for ICT, or educational technology as it is known in the USA.

There are several compelling reasons for starting such an enterprise. Indeed, not to do so is to implicitly agree with the utilitarian view of ICT being nothing more than a set of skills. Whenever you read an educationalist 's blog or a committee report espousing the view that ICT should be taught across the curriculum and has no place in the school timetable in its own right, you are ingesting the views of people who have little or no concept of the intellectual underpinnings of the subject, or of the importance of theories of learning in relation to it.

Having a library dedicated to ICT, even if only in the corner of a classroom orcomputer room to begin with, is a way of starting to address these and other concerns.

A library is?

But first, what exactly do I mean by 'library' in this context? Perhaps perversely, I do not necessarily advocate maintaining a library comprising multimedia resources -- at least, not to begin with. Whatever we may wish to beieve, books still carry an air of authority often eluded bhy other media. Besides, it's actually much easier to pick up a book and point something out than trying to locate the relevant section in a podcast, say. So, I am firmly in favour of a library comprising mainly, or even solely, printed material.

What should the library contain?

There are several types of printed material, and I would suggest building up a stock of the following:

• books;

• magazines;

• leaflets;

• advertisements;

• newspaper clippings;

• official publications such as curriculum guidance, exam specifications, and government policies;

• posters.

Reasons to have a library

Here are seven suggestions of how to make your library an integral part of the work you, your colleagues and, of course, your pupils or students do. In other words, these are the reasons to have a library.

• To inform other teachers. There are lots of books around which detail the educational benefits of using technology, and which delve into what young people do with technology. There are also books which may not be about technology per se, but which discuss the ways in which learning takes place. It's often useful to be able to lend others a book to help them understand the subject, and your approach to teaching it, a little better.

• To impress others. This may seem rather facile, but I don't think it is. If you want others to understand that ICT has intellectual value, you must have a visible indication of that fact. In short, a library tells or reminds everyone that there is more to ICT than being able to knock up a database or carry out a search on the internet.

• For reference, for you and your staff. It's almost impossible to keep up with all the policies and other documentation that comes out these days, and even harder to remember what each one stipulates. Although all of it is available electronically, I think it's easier to go straight to the relevant document on a bookshelf and find the bit you need than trying to remember where you stored it or bookmarked it.

• For reference, for everyone. I doubt that anyone has memorised every Excel formula or OpenOffice shortcut. Having a few books that go into such matters can be a godsend, espeically if they go into more depth than the on-screen or online help.

• For research. One of our wider goals should be to encourage (traditional) reading, and one way of doing so is to set work that requires book and newspaper research. Having a collection of newspaper clipping smay seem rather quaint, but I often find that unless you bookmark a newspaper story straight away it is virtually impossible to find it later. That is assuming, of course, that it was even published onine on the first place. That is not always the case, especially if the newspaper covers only a relatively small geographical area.

• For technical research. This is where having one or two computer magazines comes in handy. If you set a piece of work which entails 'speccing out' a computer system for someone, being able to pore over a comparative review article in a magazine can be a great help.

• Finally, for pleasure. What can be more enjoyable than sitting down for coffee or lunch with an interesting book? Yes, yes, I know you don't have the time. I never had the time either, when I was a teacher or, indeed, in any of my other jobs, including my current one. But it's important to make the time, even if it's only 10 minutes. Time to think, and time to relax, is never wasted.

So, before throwing out that computer magazine when you've read it, bring it into school. Encourage your students and colleagues to do the same. Use some of your allowance to buy a book or two, or recommend that such purchases be made.

It won't take long to build up a small library. Then your main challenge will be getting people to use it.