Library Lessons

By John O’Neil

Books still abound, but computers are king. Shhh...Take a tour of today’s school library.

Photo by Sandy Schaeffer

Every so often, just for a few moments, the media center at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, falls silent. Then the chatter starts up again.

No, it’s not kids swapping gossip or planning an after-school jaunt. It’s the steady chatter of keyboarding: tap, tap, tap, click, click, tap, tap, tap, tap.

“Before we had computers, if you had come here during lunch you would have heard a lot of voices,” notes Lisa Varga, who’s served as a library media specialist at Yorktown since 1996. “Now, everything is much quieter because everybody is clicking on a keyboard.”

Call it a sign of the times. The card catalog is nearly extinct, and those familiar bound volumes of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature are fast disappearing from school libraries as well. (You’ll find them online). Library shelves bulge with CD-ROMs, videos, DVDs, and audiotapes. And instead of clipping magazines to illustrate their book reports, kids today build multimedia extravaganzas using powerful graphics and presentation software.

Which raises the question: Does anyone in here check out a book anymore?

Rest assured: books remain the mainstay of the school library. According to the most recent survey by the U.S. Department of Education, about 65 percent of the money spent on public school libraries in 1999 went to books, and that number actually increased slightly from the previous study in 1992. The number of books held in the average school library also jumped to more than 10,000.

But school libraries are undergoing seismic shifts with the introduction of new technologies that draw students like moths to a flame—even if it means kids spend less time in the stacks.

Take a tour of the Yorktown High School library with Varga and it quickly becomes clear that the computer is king. The Yorktown media center has 38 of them, and kids are just as likely to have their hands on a mouse as on a book.

The attraction is obvious. With a few keystrokes, students can access the school system’s online subscription to dozens of periodicals, scour the holdings of all Arlington County public and school libraries, or cast a query into the broader Internet. They don’t even need to be at the library to do it; each kid has a user ID on the school network, and the library loans laptops to students who need one.

On a recent morning, Varga, one of the school’s four media specialists, assisted a colleague participating in the Library of Congress’ “American Memory” project, which offers teachers and students online access to a rich store of maps, historical documents, photos, and other primary source documents. “Pictures by Civil War photographers, Walt Whitman’s poetry, music—it’s all on there,” says Varga—a veritable digi-topia.

And yet, to see kids rush past the stacks of meticulously chosen and arrayed books to grab the next available computer—well, doesn’t it give her pause?

“The tendency is for a student to come in, hop on a computer, type in a topic, and off they go,” Varga muses.

“Of course, I love books—that’s why I became a librarian—and I think most librarians feel that way,” she says. “So it’s an ongoing challenge to get students to realize that you can’t always go to the Internet first. For some assignments, books are best. We spend a lot of time working with the kids on that, and the teachers do, too,” often requiring students to balance the use of print and Web resources in their research.

It’s partly an issue of quality. Before computers and the Internet, “most librarians didn’t add anything to the school library’s collection that couldn’t be substantiated,” notes Kathy Bell, who just retired after 27 years as a school librarian in Florida, and coordinates NEA’s Library Media Technology Caucus. Librarians scrutinized booklists of recommended resources, pored through dozens of catalogs of new titles, and spot-checked new materials. With the advent of the Internet, though, libraries opened up. “We don’t have control any more of what’s in here,” Bell says.

That means librarians like Varga must spend more time coaching students on how to evaluate the quality of sources on the Internet. “We tell them, ‘when you see something, you have to look at the source,’” says Varga. “‘Is it coming from a university or from someone’s basement. Who created it?’ I’m sure it’s seeping in with some of them.”

The cut-and-paste ease of Internet research also means school librarians (as well as many teachers) spend hours coaching and cajoling students on the merits of doing original work and the importance of properly crediting sources. In Arlington County, where Varga works, the school system even bought a subscription to turnitin.com so teachers can submit student papers to the online database to check for evidence of plagiarism.

Technology has made her job more complicated, Varga says, but it’s also made some of her duties—especially maintaining the media center’s collection—much easier. And when a student or teacher presents her with a puzzling research question, why, she’s just as likely as the kids to head to her computer. “We’re detectives,” she says. “There’s nothing more rewarding to us than helping someone find an answer.”

Hot Reads

Yorktown High School librarian Lisa Varga pulls out all the stops to pique students’ interest in the library’s new books, creating colorful displays and holding occasional “book talks” where she gives capsule summaries of 20 or so treasures. “I read a lot,” says Varga, “and if the kids tell me something they’ve read, I like to steer them to something else they might like.”

A few of Varga’s recent favorites for young adults:

Cabot, Meg. Princess in Love. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
A continuation of the Princess Diaries series, this volume chronicles freshman Mia’s life as she prepares to become a princess and live happily ever after with her prince charming.

Card, Orson Scott. First Meetings in the Enderverse. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2003.
Fans of Ender’s Game will enjoy meeting characters from Andrew “Ender” Wiggins’ past and learning about events that happened before he saved Earth from destruction.

Eleveld, Mark and Mark Smith, eds. Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, hip hop, and the poetry of a new generation. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2003.
Complete with audio CD, this anthology showcases the work of more than 40 new voices in American poetry.

Johnson, Angela. The First Part Last. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Alternating between past and present, 16-year-old Bobby shares his point of view as he struggles being a single-parent dad.

Soto, Gary. Afterlife. New York: Harcourt, 2003.
After being brutally murdered at his high school dance, senior Chuy observes the events that follow from his vantage point as a ghost.

Teen Read Week is coming: Get ready to get grossed out as the American Library Association supplies a week’s worth of shivers and shocks to get teens excited about reading October 17–23, 2004. For book lists, activity ideas, and more on this year’s “It’s Alive at your library” theme.

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Source: “Student Learning Through Ohio School Libraries.” Reported in School Library Journal.