Volume 7 Issue 3  May 2003

 

In this issue:

The 21st C Library

SPAM

Màori Macrons

 

Listserv Humour

 

 

The 21st C Library

The role of the school library in the knowledge era is at a crossroads. Whether it will be a reducing or an increasing one is a source of grave concern for Librarians, library organisations, schools, and ministries and departments of education, all of whom are struggling to identify the significance of their role in this radically changing information landscape. I would argue very strongly that the expectation of schools to develop attitudes and values in line with the prevailing opportunities for students to be lifelong learners, suggests that both the role and the significance of libraries and librarians must increase dramatically.

In order for students to become lifelong learners they must:

These skills will need to be taught and practiced in schools.  Who will vet, organise and screen the wide variety of information formats to ensure that the information is appropriate and then located and searched easily?  To a degree everyone within the school structure must be able to carry out these tasks.  However somebody, somewhere must be ultimately responsible for ensuring that this information is consistent, well managed, readily available, and accessible, as well as acting as a reference point when new management systems, procedures and technologies become available for information and items (electronic or physical).  The upskilled librarian, who already has the necessary understanding of how information is managed, would be the most obvious and eminently suitable person to undertake this duty within the school. It is quite common to see new labels attached to historical positions, and librarians are no exception. When visiting schools it is not unusual to see the erst’while librarian described as an information manager, a media specialist, the knowledge domain manager, the library media and technology team, the knowledge flow coordinator . . . . . .  .  the list is almost endless until sometimes the labels become somewhat meaningless, but nonetheless the role of the librarian is already changing.  Librarians traditionally have required ongoing upskilling to enable them to adapt to new information environments.  If schools are serious about students becoming lifelong learners then the role of the librarian and the functionality of the library must evolve to meet the challenges that the 21st century information landscape presents.

We have already expounded on the new definition of the term "being literate" in the 21st century.  The literacies of the 21st century are ever evolving and will in time include skills such as:

Basic Literacy: Language proficiencies using conventional literacy (http://www.ncrel.org/engauge/skills/indepth.htm)

If we are going to have schools without walls, and extend the concept of school beyond the physical buildings, then we will require libraries without walls, where students, teachers and incidental learners can access information simply and easily from any location.  In order to do this, students will need additional skill sets, and schools will require new systems that will not only allow remote access but encourage it.  Consequently schools will need to equip their libraries with new technologies (these technologies will be constructed from products, systems and environments that meet the needs and opportunities of the school).  To be effective they must meet three criteria

·         The technology must be intuitive (requiring no manuals)

·         The technology must show obvious benefits to all users

·         The technology must be cost-effective

The technologies that schools will require must allow for information resources in a wide variety of formats to be added to a searchable database that can be searched effectively and efficiently from any location.  To achieve this outcome, schools will have three alternatives:

·         Host the information off-site in a web based format on a remote web server,

·         Provide all users with remote access software,

·         Have a static IP address and host the information in a Web based format on the school web server,

It may well be, in fact it will be an absolute necessity, that students access most of their resources remotely.  We are not just referring here to senior secondary students, but rather all students at all levels.  With increasing penetration of computers into homes, students should/could be able to access all the information resources, including the ones that they have produced themselves, from any computer anywhere.  Many school library catalogue systems already offer some of these services, and if schools are looking at purchasing such systems it is important to ensure that they allow for remote access from within as well as from outside the school, via the Internet or some similar technology.

Once schools are able to offer a service such as this they become information providers to entire communities, and the library walls start to crumble.  Sometimes it is those who are most removed from classrooms who can see the issues the most clearly.  To quote Pink Floyd in their song "Another Brick in the Wall"

We don't need no education

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey teacher, leave them kids alone

All in all it’s just another brick in the wall

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall

Our job and is to make sure that we remove the bricks and dismantle walls, allowing schools to become a 24/7 experience if this is what they desire.  In doing so we also allow the general community to become part of the learning community of the school.

But what will the library without walls look like?

The library without walls may not look drastically different from the libraries that we see today but they will function very differently.  We may see in libraries more "electronic information access machines," but libraries will still contain plenty of books which, after all are a very clever technology, being hard to replicate electronically. 

Certain issues will have to be resolved in regard to whether the library is best set up as a central resourcing unit, or whether the resources are distributed in a decentralised way within each department or syndicate/year level.  There are advantages to both of these models, and librarians should not be too distressed with the concept of a decentralised model.  Schools cannot move to the decentralised model unless they have in place a sophisticated electronic cataloguing system that can be accessed easily to discover where the school resources are at any given time. Teachers and students also need to have access from any room at any time to this cataloguing system. The librarian’s main role is to assist in the organisation and distribution of information, along with training users to efficiently locate and manage the information.  The management of information is undergoing a considerable upheaval in libraries throughout the world as schools start implementing electronic systems for both indexing the material that is available, and also managing the loan and return of physical resources.

As libraries increase the range of resources that they have on offer, and increase substantially their electronic collections, it becomes more and more important that indexing and cataloguing systems are consistent, effective and simple to search. It became obvious some years ago that a global standard for indexing and cataloguing would become essential, with the increase in electronic documents and their increasingly global nature.  The generally accepted standard has become what is known as "Dublin Core” (Dublin; Ohio; USA).  Librarians with an interest in this subject can read more of this at these two web sites:

http://dublincore.org/

http://www.fidocat.com/meta_data/lesson_three.htm

Essentially the Dublin core initiative detailed how each document should be described.  The Dublin Core Element Set is a set of data that does this.  It consists of 15 descriptive data elements relating to content, intellectual property and instantiation. The elements include title, creator, publisher, subject, description, source, language, relation, coverage, date, type, format, identifier, contributor and rights, all of which are to be supplied by the producer of the resource.

Web pages, documents or resources can have this data set attached to each document electronically, and this collection of information about the document can travel with it, making use of a relatively new web standard known as XML (eXtensible Markup Language).  If documents are XML enabled, and your school has the capacity to read this attached information, the data about the information can be moved directly into a database and will be automatically searched when students carry out a search.  This means that teachers and librarians do not need to re-enter this data set about the information or documents they have downloaded or received (if they have an indexing agent that can read the XML data).  This may seem trivial until you start collecting tens of thousands of electronic documents that you want to be able to search effectively.  In the electronic world of the Internet it is quite easy to gather together huge numbers of web sites.  Unless these are correctly organised and catalogued the information may as well not be there.  The Dublin core global standard allows us to move information and resources much more effectively.

Australia and New Zealand have recently committed tens of millions of dollars to a project known as the Schools Online Curriculum Content Initiative.  This initiative has been charged with creating a vast library of learning elements.  These may vary from a single image through to a complete unit of work.  Each of these learning elements will be tagged with XML data using the Dublin Core (DC) standard.  You can then search for just images, images dealing with fire stations, or images dealing with firemen, and get back elements/objects which much more precisely fit your search requirements.  You can find more information on Schools Online Curriculum Content Initiative at http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/  Other countries have also started this process and there are some notable US States that have been involved in this area for over two years.

With these innovations such as these it is going to be important that librarians and teachers responsible for information management are upskilled in this area, and are aware of the appropriate technologies, and how they can be managed efficiently within the school to allow information, learning elements, units of work, student resources and data to be managed well.  This will almost certainly involve integration with the school’s Knowledge NET or intranet.

Student access to Library Based Information Systems can be facilitated from computers based in classrooms or the library, but it is also possible for them to be accessible via PDA’s, Laptops and Tablets.  These technologies will all allow remote access, possibly via wireless systems, to the school’s Knowledge NET or intranet.  The librarian in this instance will not necessarily need to be a technology expert but rather one who has an indepth knowledge of what the possibilities are in terms of technology and information management. 

The focus of librarianship will still be on the management and accessibility of information, it is just that the information being accessed by students will be more varied, and include more multimedia components as accessibility tools become increasingly more electronic oriented.  When we put dishes in the dishwasher we are not expected to know how the dishwasher works, just where to place the dishes so they can be washed most efficiently, and the same principle applies to information management.  It is not important to know how every piece of technology or software works but rather how to use the system to get the best possible results.

This is probably the most exciting time to be a librarian or in charge of information management within a school.  The demands on schools to supply both high quality and quantity information sources to both teachers and students, and make them easily searchable, will considerably enhance the role of the librarian/information manager. This dramatic change in the information landscape, coupled with the capacity to easily access these resources underpins the evolving Knowledge Era, and if this change is not brought about quickly, or not managed well, the framework for 21st-century thinking, teaching and learning will fail.  Our inevitable conclusion therefore must be that the role of the librarian/information manager has never been more critical.

 

MÀORI MACRONS (Courtesy on NZcomped List (nzcomped@massey.ac.nz))

The ‘Màori Keyboard Definition’ will allow you to easily insert the extended characters used in the Màori language. 

The University of Waikato approached Microsoft with the idea of redefining the tilde / left quotation key (~`) on the keyboard.
After installing the Màori Keyboard Definition a user can press the ~` key once then any vowel. 

To download this feature: - go to the web site http://www.microsoft.co.nz/ and select ‘Màori Macrons’ in the download section on the right hand side of the site.

Restart your computer and the macrons will work – à º ï ò þ       À ª Ï Ò Þ

 

The Listserv Question

How many internet mail list subscribers does it take to change a light bulb?
ANSWER:  1,331:

I/we are not responsible for this humour. It is strange that truth is funnier than fiction.

SPAM

K9 is an excellent SPAM filer http://www.keir.net/k9.html that is very small, just 52KB (zipped) is free and makes use of Bayesian principles to filter out “spam” from your mail. It works with Outlook/Outlook Express etc as well as all the main POP3 mail systems (Not suitable for networks).

From the web site:

K9 is an email filtering application that works in conjunction with your regular POP3 email program and automatically classifies incoming emails as spam (junk email) or non-spam without the need for maintaining dozens of rules or constant updates to be downloaded. It uses intelligent statistical analysis that can result in extremely high accuracy over time.

K9 learns from its mistakes and becomes better and better at being able to identify spam. More importantly it learns to recognize what you consider to be spam.

It does not support Hotmail, AOL or any other kind of “webmail type” systems. (edited from a great list called LangaList (Fred Langa) SUBSCRIBE (it's free!): Create and send a new email to subscribe-langalist@lyris.dundee.net This is a great List for the tech people in your school.)

 

For suggestions and questions please e-mail

teachers@work.co.nz