The essential school librarian (Gettysburg Times op-ed)

What does a high school library program do to be worthy of the part of the budget it requires? Its first priority is to support the curriculum of all departments which require its resources. The second priority is to present attractive reading materials at several levels.

A good school librarian is proactive. He or she must actively connect the library with teachers whose courses have a research component. This means going to the September department meetings and making known that teachers are welcome to meet with the librarian to plan how to match resources with course projects. A good librarian will have read as many course guides as possible to anticipate how to respond to a teacher’s needs. Also the librarian will ask to have input into any research assignment hand-outs given to the students.

Preparing a school library collection of book and digital resources is a continuous process. To find the latest books, the librarian will read numerous catalogs and journals to find titles which fit curricular needs. Also the librarian needs to scan the existing book collection regularly for books to be “weeded” as not relevant or under utilized.

There are many available subscription databases which provide an immense amount of high quality information. For example the GALE company offers numerous database choices of all possible topics in school curricula. However, online resources are as expensive as they are useful. The librarian must be mindful of cost as well as how accessible an online data base is to students of various abilities. Additionally, all useful publicly available databases should be readily available to students on the 25-30 computer stations in the library.

A challenge to every school librarian is how to redirect the attention of students from “Ask Jeeves,” to using factual and substantial databases.

One principal which needs to be taught is that every database has its own personality. For example asking Jeeves for ‘senior citizens’ might bring a list of high school seniors and a civics lesson. However, students need to learn that a search term such as ‘geriatric’ will produce results which are authentic information. To remedy this problem, the librarian might present a media projector lesson on how to access and use quality databases.

Here are some examples of how the school library expands the classroom and livens up the curriculum. When I was a high school English teacher, I found the school library very useful. My 9th graders researched ancient Greek culture in preparation for The Odyssey. Most semesters I required a book report during each nine week grading period. A good school library will meet the need for interesting, grade level appropriate biographies. My students wrote reports in a prescribed format and read them aloud to the class, so all were exposed to the lives of many worthy people. The next nine weeks they read and reported on a nonfiction work, after I convinced them that reading nonfiction really could be entertaining. The 11th graders did a full literary research paper, using both book and online resources, chosen and made available through professionally selected acquisitions. That made it possible for students to chose almost any modern writer as their subjects.

The second priority for a school library is to present a wide range of books which are intended to match the interest of a student simply looking to read a book or choosing books as a class assignment. These will be both fiction and nonfiction works. In fiction the first criteria might be to provide well known classics. Any good collection will have some Dickens, Austen, Twain, Hemingway, and many other well respected authors. Another source of good titles are the books usually referred to as “Young Adult.” These are especially appropriate as their reading level tends to match the middle group of high school readers. There also must be some titles of very simple, accessible books for reluctant readers, as well as students learning English as a foreign language.

As for nonfiction choices, most of those books will be chosen to suit some aspect of curricular needs. However, we are in an age of superb nonfiction writers. An example is John Macphee whose books are expansions of New Yorker articles on an amazing range of topics in which he makes the mundane seem magical.

High school classes are really all about grades. Students do various activities which will be judged and a grade awarded. To be fair, the criteria for achieving these grades must be exactly the same for every student. This is where the school library has its best effect. Reports or research projects, whatever is done in the school library is a singular choice and the products are particular to the student. That individual experience, and other benefits of the library, are what make a library program worthwhile.

Robert B. Lasco is a member of the DFA Education Task Force. Before retiring, he worked for 15 years as a high school librarian in Maryland.