SCHOOL LIBRARIES WORLDWIDE

Volume 18, Number 1, January 2012

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Theme: Connections: School librarians linking learning, leadership, technology, and society

Editorial
Connecting is at the Core of Teacher Librarianship
Marcia A. Mardis
The Florida State University, USA

Digital Image Tagging: A Case Study with Seventh Grade Students [public access article]
Zorana Ercegovac, Drexel University, USA

Results of this exploratory study suggested engaging students in digital image tagging can have analytical and educational importance. The study was designed to gauge middle school students’ capacities to describe digital images from two digital libraries that they used in an information literacy activity. When describing the image attributes, students (N=81) freely chose single words and multiword phrases to describe the interpretations, feelings, and questions evoked by the images. These descriptors were used to derive conceptual categories for the seventeen digital images. Results demonstrated that students acknowledged the responsibility of indexers to choose index terms for objects in collections that enable identification, organization and retrieval. The study sheds light on the potential to improve age-appropriate access to images by means of offering a multi-tiered approach to image representation. It also introduces a transparent approach to teaching information literacy concepts through creative thinking about the meaning of resources and their relationship in a broader information cycle context.

Librarians' Leadership Efficacy, Training, and School Involvement: Collaboration between Teachers and School Librarians in Israel
Ruth Ash-Argyle, Leo Baeck Education Center, Israel & Snunith Shoham, Bar Ilan University, Israel

This paper analyzes the correlation between the type of training received by librarians, their leadership efficacy and their involvement in the life of the school, and patterns of teacher-librarian collaboration (TLC) in Israel. The study was based on 291 questionnaires answered by school librarians, teachers, and principals of public schools in Israel. The research findings indicate that leadership ability is predictive of an advanced pattern of teacher-librarian collaboration (TLC). Similarly, the perceived level of advanced cooperation was lower among librarians who do not have a teaching license, than for either teacher-librarians or librarians with a teaching license who work only in the library. The teacher librarians were perceived to have the highest level of pedagogical and social involvement, and therefore the chances that they will maintain an advanced pattern of TLC are the higher.

Connecting Teacher Librarians for Technology Integration Leadership
Melissa P. Johnston, University of Kentucky, USA

The changing information landscape and the highly technological environment of 21st century schools require that teacher librarians evolve as leaders in integrating technology to address the needs of a new generation of learners. Technology and digital resources must be integrated into learning experiences to ensure that students are prepared to succeed and meet the demands of a digital society. Teacher librarians, through working with teachers and students, have a vital role to play in making certain that students develop the 21st century skills that will enable them to use technology as a tool for learning and participate in a digital culture. This research investigated the current practice of accomplished teacher librarians in order to identify what factors were enabling some to thrive as technology integration leaders and what was hindering others. In the identification of these enablers and barriers several themes emerged and the most frequently identified enablers were related to relationships, or connections, that enabled technology integration leadership enactment for teacher librarians. This report of results focuses on those vital connections and implications for the profession.

The Literacy Beliefs of Child Care Professionals: Prerequisite Knowledge for Teacher librarian Literacy Leaders
Maria Cahill, Texas Woman’s University, USA

Teacher librarians can offer professional development, services, and programming to instructional leaders and care providers of young children; however, to optimize instruction, they should understand the general knowledge base of early care professionals. This study examined the literacy beliefs of the instructional leaders of child care facilities. Instructional leaders self-reported their beliefs through response to a survey that contained the Teacher Beliefs Questionnaire (Seefeldt, 2004). Results suggest that instructional leaders’ beliefs are most consistent with research-based best literacy practice in the areas of book reading and writing and most contradictory in decoding knowledge. Additionally, care providers appear not to have a full understanding of the relationship between early vocabulary development and later reading ability. These findings point to areas which teacher librarians should target in offering professional development. Specifically, in read-aloud sessions librarians should model repeated readings, the use of expository text, facilitation of children’s vocabulary development and incorporation of developmentally appropriate code-focused instruction into fun-filled, child-friendly activities and conversations. In co-planning and delivery of professional development, librarians can underscore the importance of vocabulary-building experiences and interactions and promote the reciprocal benefits of reading and writing development.

Making Connections: Challenges and Benefits of Joint Use Libraries as Seen in One Community
Joanna Kluever, The Julia Hull District Library, USA & Wayne Finley, Northern Illinois University, USA

This paper explores research relating to the challenges and benefits of joint use libraries and places these issues in the context of one community’s joint use library. In 2002, the Julia Hull District Library, located in rural Stillman Valley, Illinois, USA, entered into a contractual agreement with the village School District to move the library from a small family home, to a new facility which was built on to the Village high school. Originally, the partnership, as is common with joint library endeavors, was created for economic reasons: the school and library districts would share costs, materials, and resources for the benefit of local taxpayers to accommodate student and public patrons. While new opportunities to connect student and public library users through library programs and services have arisen, since the merger, the community has realized additional benefits and challenges foreshadowed by prior international research.

Designing the Research Commons: Classical Models for School Libraries
Sarah Buchanan, The Meadows School, USA

School libraries and media centers today are embracing the idea of the "learning commons," an approach to learning which makes use of the facility's physical openness and group meeting places to facilitate current shifts towards computer-based resource sharing and collaborative student projects. How can libraries yet to make this transition reverse a prior, mid-twentieth-century architectural bent toward segmentation of school library resources from the surrounding institution, and implement a more inclusive school library design? The open library paradigm is shown to represent a return to the principles of the earliest democratic libraries and repositories in the Western tradition. A qualitative metasynthesis of both the literature of library architecture and of the history of school libraries was undertaken in order to increase librarians' awareness of classical forms which influence design decisions into the twenty-first century.

The Digital Lives of U.S. Teachers: A Research Synthesis and Trends to Watch
Marcia A. Mardis, Teralee ElBasri, Sylvia K. Norton, & Janice Newsum
The Florida State University, USA

The United States Department of Education’s 2010 National Educational Technology Plan called for educators to transform learning and teaching with digital resources and tools. However, classroom teachers are especially challenged by information seeking, use, and management as well as by increased pressure to provide accountability data and serve diverse learners. In response to these challenges, the digital library community, spurred to improve science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) education, is developing solutions that include metadata and paradata schema; highly curated, centralized collections; and integrated planning, management, and assessment tools. Still, local and external factors can hinder change and must be considered in design and implementation. In this paper, we integrate an extensive collection of research relating to educators’ digital “lives,” or processes; provide an overview of very recent developments in digital library technology that pose possible solutions; and illustrate essential facilitating conditions, including the vital role of the teacher librarian.

Seeing the Clouds: Teacher Librarian as Broker in Collaborative Planning with Teachers
Sue C. Kimmel, Old Dominion University, USA

Teachers engaged in sustained collaboration with a teacher librarian were interviewed about the meaning of that collaboration. The findings suggest that the teachers recognized important contributions of the librarian to instructional planning and classroom instruction including knowledge, legwork, and support. In particular, they understood her role as a broker both to resources and to ideas for using those resources in instruction. While these resources were essential, they were not sufficient; they required a knowledgeable peer who also understood their application to the curriculum and what students were expected to learn. They required a librarian.

Teacher Librarians as Connectors to the School CEO
Vicki VanTuyle, Southern Illinois University, USA & Sandra Watkins, Western Illinois University, USA

Forty-nine rural superintendents in two Midwestern states in the USA participated in a qualitative study to investigate how they utilized research and information expertise of teacher librarians to solve district challenges and opportunities. Researchers partnered with six Midwestern regional offices of education who helped facilitate the study’s focus groups. Resulting data indicated that a majority of superintendents were not accessing the expertise of the teacher librarian. They were not familiar with the role of teacher librarians, nor were they familiar with the current research on the importance of school libraries and librarians in advancing student learning and student achievement.

Learning Resources Centers in Kuwait: Prospects for the Future
Taghreed AlQudsi-Ghabra, Ammar H. Safar, & Nedaa M. Qabazard
Kuwait University, Kuwait

Many countries have documented the impact of school learning resources centers (LRCs), serving students aged 6-18 years and pre-school, on the educational process and on student learning (Lonsdale,
2003), and have found that both human and material resources are essential to effective LRC operation. Kuwait has been blessed with an early educational public school system, which has been establishing a library in each school for over a course of more than seventy years. However, this early system has failed to keep pace with the latest advancement in the school library arena in terms of personnel, resource, and services that serve students, teachers and school administrators alike. Studying the current situation of school libraries in Kuwait is an important prerequisite to evaluating the situation in preparation for any reform. This paper is an analytical description of the current state of public school libraries in Kuwait, and it offers some suggestions for their reform.

Digital Natives, 21st Century School Libraries, and 21st Century Preparation Programs: An Informal Affirmation of Branch and deGroot
Cynthia Houston, Western Kentucky University, USA

The presentations from the 2011 IASL conference theme School Libraries: Empowering the 21st Century Learner offered much to think about for graduate programs preparing future teacher librarians. Research indicates that school librarians are not actively integrating Web 2.0 tools into their programs, but students are regularly using these tools outside of school for accessing and sharing information. Professional preparation programs must help future librarians master these tools so they can be school leaders on the Web 2.0 technology frontier. This paper discusses issues related to Web 2.0 integration in online graduate programs in school librarianship and offers examples of Web 2.0 activities that can be used in graduate courses.

Indexed in Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis, Children Literature Abstracts, Contents Pages in Education, Educational Resources Information Clearing house (ERIC), Library Literature, and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA).

Last updated January 2012 (KSB)