Searching, searching, searching...

This week we were to look at how Google, Yahoo and DMOZ, or The Open Directory, three different search engines, determine relevancy rankings. The best thing that I got out of this exercise was the discovery of DMOZ. When I saw the name, Open Directory, it rang a bell, but I had never tried it. I was pleasantly surprised when the search words that I entered for each search engine turned up the best results in DMOZ.

"Ancient +Egypt +grade +7 +resources" yielded 20 educational sites in DMOZ, and in Google and Yahoo my search yielded mainly irrelevant results.  Because I used Boolean logic (adding "+") to narrow down my results, the number of websites was considerably lower than if I had simply typed in a question or a key phrase with none of the following symbols: +, -, "". 

In the discussion forum this week many of my classmates shared their frustration with the Metadata articles, but they also shared some kid-friendly search engines such as: Kids' Search Tools, Kids Click. I would also like to share SweetSearch as a student-friendly search engine. Joyce Valenza says this about Finding Dulcinea, which operates SweetSearch: "What does FindingDulcinea do right? It organizes. It evaluates. It creates context. It is conscious of design. It gets media."  

Try out your next query on SweetSearch and let me know what you think! 

If you are in a French Immersion school/library and are looking for a good French language search engine, try out La Toile du Québec. I've gotten good results for my searches with this search engine.

What is Metadata?

I knew nothing about Metadata coming into this lesson and at first I found it all quite confusing. I now have a general idea of what it is, but it will require a re-reading of the articles to become more clear on all of its purposes. I think that what was initially holding me back from understanding the intricacies of Metadata was me not being able to see its relevance for digital resources in the library. When I think of digital resources, I think of , first of all, websites that will help students with their learning and research. It has been my experience over the years that when I find a list of websites on a particular topic there are often a few, if not many, dead links. This experience underlines that fact that websites are impermanent. It is for this reason that I don't see the need to spend a lot of time creating Metadata for a list of great websites that the students can use. Why go to all that trouble when the website could no longer be accessible by that URL in who knows how little time?

However, after reading one of Keith's posts where he explains how he writes Metadata on digital resources to include in the library catalogue, I can see how this would be helpful for the students. If a student is looking up information on Ancient Egypt, a list of books and a website or an online database will show up in his/her search results. Having the digital resources listed in the library catalogue will eliminate the additional step of checking out the library website for a list of websites provided by the teacher-librarian.

Something else that I realized when reading about Metadata, in the lesson material for the course, was that Metadata can be as simple or as complex as you would like it to be. It is simply another way to organize resources to make them easier for patrons to find.

I get it!!

Access

There was a lot of lively discussion this past week for Lesson 2 on "Access". We were asked to reflect on "access" related to the library, how our library dealt with it and how committed we were to "access".

Below is a shortened list of a teacher-librarian's responsibilities included in Lesson 2 of LIBE 465:

1) Acquisition

• budgeting
• evaluation
• selection
• purchasing

2) Organization and maintenance

• cataloguing and processing
• analyzing the collection
• weeding

3) Circulation

• automation
• access (including location of resources)
• security

As Elizabeth wrote in her comment for this week's lesson all of these duties affect students' and teachers' access to the library. My comment was, "Access is of utmost importance to a library. For without access, what is the purpose of the library? Cutting back on time given to Teacher-Librarians most definitely has an impact on access to resources. Although the teachers and students may be able to enter the library and ultimately consult and borrow books, they may not be fully aware of what the library has to offer without the guidance of a Teacher-Librarian." Both my comments and Elizabeth's comments focus on the duties of the teacher-librarian. Elizabeth talks about the behind-the-scenes duties and my comment is more about the face-to-face duties. Both are equally important. If you don't have an excellent, well organized collection that meets the needs of the patrons, then the patrons will not come to the library. But, if you don't have a teacher-librarian in the library, then the patrons won't be able to access the excellent collection.

This week, I also got into some discussion about having Young Adult fiction in an elementary library. This relates to "access" as well, in two ways. One, we want the library to have materials that will meet the needs of the upper intermediate students. For, if they don't find books of interest to them in the library, then they may not want to visit. Secondly, we don't want the primary students to have unlimited access to books meant for older students. This type of access is hard to control in my library as it is an open library that anyone can enter at anytime and our library is only staffed the equivalent of 3 days a week. I did not find a suitable solution to my problem, even after much discussion, so I will not be having a Young Adult shelf in my library in the near future. I am open to ideas on how to solve this problem and will continue to look for a solution. Do you have any ideas?

In closing, I am pleased to say that I have the problem where more classes want to work with me in the library than I have time for. Sounds like a funny problem, but maybe I could add this example to some advocacy projects geared to increase TL staffing in my library...

(I created this image on Image Chef.)

Organizing the Library

I am starting my 3rd year as teacher-librarian in a French Immersion school in Kamloops and am working on my 9th course toward my teacher-librarian diploma program. It seems like just yesterday that I was starting my coursework after having been away from university for almost 20 years.

These courses has been the best professional development for me, and LIBE 465 promises to be no exception. It is funny how the TL courses that I take each semester seem to meet my exact needs in the area that I would like to focus on and improve in my library. This semester it will be to have my teacher resources more easily accessible and to make the collection, as a whole, more appealing to students. I'm not sure what this will look like for my assignments, but I am sure that I will soon come up with a specific idea for these.

Over the summer I had the time to play a little with Twitter, something that I signed up for in my LIBE 477 class. I signed up just to find out what it was about, never intending to tweet, only intending to follow. But as with all conversations, one-sided ones are pretty boring. I'm tweeting a little now and I see that my tweets open up new doors, especially in the area of professional development. It was by tweeting that I found out about Shannon Miller, a teacher-librarian from Van Meter, Iowa. This summer she decided to turn the organization of her library upside down. She ditched the dewey decimal system and went to a "bookstore" model. You can read more about it here.

I brought this up here, because it is about library organization and I have been wondering about how to make the collection more accessible and inviting to the students. Maybe this would work... it would take a lot of re-organizing and a big leap of faith.

What do you think of this idea?

Before I go, I want to leave you with this funny video, that I also found thanks to Twitter!