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SCHOOL LIBRARIES WORLDWIDE

Volume 12, Number 1, January 2006

Editorial
Dianne Oberg

Information Literacy in the New Zealand Education Sector
Penny Moore
A relational model of information literacy (Bruce 1997) has been used as a framework for examining national policies, teacher education, curriculum integration and assessment issues relating to information literacy and lifelong learning. Initiatives by a range of stakeholders are included to illustrate shared responsibility and support for the educational goals. Successful development of ICT capacity in schools and extension of technological skills of teachers have yet to be matched in teacher education by explicit, systematic attention to the broader requirements of information literacy. National curriculum documents imply an intention to ensure information literacy continues to be embedded in essential learning areas, but indications are that this is not translating evenly into teaching practice.

What Motivates a Lifelong Learner?
Sherry R. Crow
Lifelong learners are people who display an attitude and ability that prompts them to learn across their life spans. Even within the testing environment of U.S. schools today, a goal of library media specialists is to help children become “lifelong learners”. The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 1985) provides a framework for examining a positive disposition toward learning, or the motivation to learn ­the key attribute of a lifelong learner. Additional areas explored include contributions of school library research toward an understanding of student motivation, suggestions for further areas of study, and implications for school libraries.

Theme Section: Policy: Empowering School Libraries
Theme Editor, James Henri

Australia’s Professional Excellence Policy: Empowering School Libraries
Pru Mitchell
All sectors of Australian education are currently seeking to define and promote quality teaching, and are developing policies on teacher quality and educational leadership. The national Framework for Professional Standards for Teaching sets out agreed foundational elements and dimensions of effective teaching, and provides an architecture within which generic, specialist and subject-area specific professional standards can be developed. In 2005 the Australian School Library Association (ASLA) and the Australian Library & Information Association (ALIA) released the joint publication: Standards of Professional Excellence for Teacher Librarians, a document that assists teacher librarians to find their place within the professional teaching standards agenda. This paper will outline the policy framework underpinning the ALIA-ASLA Standards of Professional Excellence for Teacher Librarians and show how the project seeks to empower school libraries by helping teacher librarians evaluate their professional practice.

Norwegian Policy: Empowering School Libraries
Elisabeth Tallaksen Rafste, Tove Pemmer Sætre, and Ellen Sundt
This article has two aims. The first aim is to describe and discuss how the political school and library systems in Norway interact to improve school libraries and reading. Empowerment is introduced as an overarching concept, and legal based- and legitimacy based power as useful concepts to describe and discuss the interaction of the systems. The second aim is to present and discuss how the Norwegian plan "Make space for reading! Norwegian Strategy for stimulating a Love of Reading and Reading Skills, 2003–2007” focuses on empowering school libraries through selected strategic projects and financial support.

England and Wales: The School Library Policy, The Foundation for a Professional School Library Service
Richard Turner
This paper stresses the importance of the school library policy for the management of secondary school libraries in England and Wales. It identifies the guidelines for best practice on producing a policy, key elements of the policy and the reasons that the policy is so important for the management of an effective school library service. The theory of the school library policy is assessed against practice in individual school libraries using research carried out by the author as part of a Masters dissertation, and other surveys of secondary school libraries which have addressed this issue. The article concludes that many schools in England and Wales have not embraced the guidelines on the school library policy as a key management tool in the operation of the library.

Korea: A Study of School Library Policy Development
Yoon-Ok Han
Until the 1990s, school libraries were a very low priority in the South Korean educational system. But, the Korean government has developed a five-year master plan for the improvement of school libraries. Likewise the government has been undertaking significant educational reform in order to cultivate creative human resources through open education and lifelong learning. The implementations of these educational reforms are based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education and the Seventh Educational Curriculum. In additions to these policies, NGO’s activity was very effective in developing school libraries. Today, South Korea has a modern, well-developed school library system.

Information Policy for Hong Kong Schools: The Case of the Missing Chop Sticks
James Henri and Sandra Lee
A project to develop a research instrument to study information policy in schools was conducted and part of that study, a literature review and a Hong Kong based study was completed to benchmark information policy practice in schools in Hong Kong. The authors found that information policy at a macro level was addressed well in the literature as governments address a quagmire of intellectual property, intellectual freedom, security, privacy and administrative issues. Information policy at the micro level­in schools, was lacking. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the micro-level set of information policies is handled in schools. An online questionnaire administered to in-service teachers in Hong Kong provided findings that reinforced the authors' initial hunch that information policy is a topic more talked about than understood. Comparisons with information policy development in other countries, using the instrument is worth pursuing.

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 12 May 2006 (KSB)