Libraries Are More User Friendly in the Information Age

Say the words school library and some people may think of aisle after aisle of books, all surrounding an ancient wooden card catalogue. They haven’t been to a public school library recently! Sure, the books are still there, but the card catalogues are going or gone, replaced by high-tech gadgetry. Many cumbersome reference books have also been replaced as school libraries share in the benefits of the information age. That old card catalogue, for example, is now on computer. My school library uses the Unix-Based Operating System (IBM and Macintosh also make popular electronic catalogue programs). With our system, students find books by title, author or subject, but Unix offers several advantages over card catalogues. Spelling, for example, doesn’t have to be exact. If a child types gost , for example, instead of ghost , he or she will find the needed book, and a reminder of the correct spelling. Accessibility is improved too. Electronic catalogues are often accessible from students’ home computers with a modem and telephone line. With a home computer, students also can identify reference materials they need, place a hold on them and pick them up the next day at school--or, in some cases, get an instant printout of the information. Other resources can be blended with the card catalogue into the Unix, including access to an electronic bulletin board, which lists school information, events and even participating teachers’ assignments. (Our system at Santa Monica High also links users to Santa Monica City Hall and the local public library, and will soon connect with all of the University of California libraries.) CD-ROMs (compact disc-read-only-memory) have also brought wondrous changes to many school libraries. * They look just like music CDs, but contain hundreds of thousands of words, sounds, pictures, maps, graphs and charts. The machines that operate them work basically like computers. The shelf-space (and upper-body strength) needed to use encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference books is immaterial now, thanks to a wealth of new CD-ROM programs. Encyclopedias are much easier to use. There are CD-ROM versions (which preserve the print volumes entirely) from four leading school encyclopedia publishers: Compton’s, World Book, Funk & Wagnall’s and Grolier’s. Remember those troublesome volumes of the Periodical Index, and their annoying paperback addenda, needed to track down newspaper and magazine articles? Well, forget them. They’re on CD-ROM. There are also some helpful variations on the article-tracing theme. CD NewsBank, for example, not only finds articles on your topic, it also presents them on the screen, available for instant printout. CD NewsBank offers full-text newspaper and wire service articles for the last year in 10 categories, including politics and government, people, arts and literature, and health and science. Another CD-ROM source, InfoTrac, specializes in magazine searching. It draws on nearly 200 publications, covering the last four years, to find and display the text of articles on your topic. ProQuest searches magazines too, and offers some extra features. Articles are displayed as they appeared in the publication (InfoTrac provides the text on the computer screen or in hard copy). And you can enlarge and reduce the display before printing it out. ProQuest uses 187 magazines, and allows you to read an article’s abstract, or summary, before calling up the whole article. These are the most commonly used CD-ROM programs, but there are many others, such as atlases, books of quotations, thesauruses, Bible translations, and indexes of poetry (with complete texts). You may wonder how such expensive, high-tech improvements are possible for school libraries when school classrooms are doing without basic supplies. * In general, public school libraries aren’t relying as much on school district funds anymore; they’re applying for state and private grants and soliciting donations from a variety of sources. District money contributed almost nothing to the new improvements in my school’s library. Most of the equipment was donated by William S. Mortensen of First Federal Savings, while the rest came primarily from grants authorized by the Legislature, the Santa Monica Educational Foundation, our PTA and other contributing parents.