SANTA ANA : New Plan Will Link Students to Books

A cooperative plan now being implemented by the public library, the city school district and a college district will dramatically improve the ability of local students to check out books and do research, library officials said.

The plan will eventually allow the 49,000 students in the Santa Ana Unified School District to check out books from the public and Rancho Santiago College libraries electronically--without leaving their campuses.

Under the program, youngsters will be able to check out books and have them delivered as early as the next day to the school district headquarters, which would then distribute them to the various campuses.

Called “Project Knowledge Link,” the effort will begin as a pilot program at 10 schools as early as April, said Rob Richard, director of the public library, on Friday.

“There are a lot of good reasons to do this. It’s much less expensive than having the school district build additional media centers or having the library build a new branch,” he said.

“This way also takes care of a lot of transportation issues. If we send a packet (of books) to a school and serve 60 students on a given day, we’ve saved 60 trips to the library that parents would have had to arrange. Many of those trips may not have occurred because of transportation difficulties otherwise,” he said.

Knowledge Link could be running as early as April, when the school district is expected to install the $20,000 in computer equipment the program requires. After that, students will immediately gain access to about 500,000 volumes more than are currently available in the district library, he said.

Richard expects Project Knowledge Link to uncover or create a vast untapped demand for reading materials by students.

Once the program is running, he said, “I hope we can keep the books going out the door as fast as they need them. My greatest fear is being too successful.”