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Ask Slashdot: How To Reimagine a Library?
dptalia writes "I'm part of a team tasked with re-imagining my local elementary school's library. Libraries, especially school libraries, are struggling to remain relevant in today's world, when so much reading and research can be done from home. But this school has mostly low-income students who don't have the sort of high-tech resources at home that we all take for granted. What ideas do you have to turn an elementary school library into an environment that fosters innovation and technology?"
My own kids have this problem. They assume that if they type something into Google, they'll find what they need. The problem is, they don't know how to properly structure their queries so they find the relevant stuff quickly, so they end up wasting time just in the searching. Take the time to instruct the kids on how to structure a query in Google, and you'll save them a lot of time so they can actually complete their assignments quicker. Also, introduce them to other information sites like Wolfram Alpha or searching through a local newspaper database, so that they're aware that sites other than Wikipedia even exist.
Cheap desktop computers running free operating systems. You can install Ubuntu or some other *nix distro free on pretty much any old used computer.
WiFi access. I would imagine that your internet bill will likely be your biggest long-term expense. You can get some pretty awesome consumer routers, install DD-WRT on them or tomato USB or whatever) and get some pretty fancy functionality. I've been eyeing this one.
And maybe the most affordable ebook readers or tablets for checkout. You might get a sponsorship from Google or Amazon -- they are all too anxious to rope people into their ebook ecosystems. I would try to avoid these book ecosystems for cost reasons. You can also get all kinds of amazing old books through project gutenberg. Maybe OLPC would have a suitable device?
You might also keep some physical books of historical interest or perhaps large maps or other visually oriented works that resist digitization.
I honestly think you need to explain to the students the value of "reading pre-curated knowledge" from established experts (aka books) versus random one-off drivel on the screen (which includes comments on slashdot)
Too many times people think in a post-wikipedia world "real books" are outdated.
here's what worked in our low income elementary school libraries: 1. allow children to stay there until after 6PM when a parent could pick them up. this ONE thing was the most popular, and might be extended to 7PM. 2. allow 7AM entry, too. this was hit-and-miss, but where it hit, it was a BIG hit. both the above need a minimum of 3 PAID adult (over 25) supervisors. this is in addition to the actual librarian. 3. then, just stay out of their way. they'll let you know the next direction. in other words: don't guess and hope for change.
Google is only useful after you have learned something about how to search. School librarians are good at teaching people how to search. Helping students learn how to use any index, including Google -- and judge the results they get -- is a superb goal for a school library.