The benefits of having a school library website...

This week our lesson was on library websites and the importance of these. I had forgotten about Joyce Valenza's wiki on all of the components you can include in library website. What a gem! I will continue to consult this resource in the future.

In my view, a school library website is very essential. It is a place to house or catalogue the resources that we offer through the school districts, in the form of online encyclopaedias and databases, and it is also a place where we can, as teacher-librarians, organize any excellent websites that we have found to support the students and staff in our schools.

However, my classmate, Kaija, made a good point. Why have a library website in a school of 500 with fewer than 50 computers and when these same students do not have access to computers at home? Good question! I still think that we need to have library websites as a way to organize any online resources we find and as a way to advocate and communicate with others what is going on in our libraries.

This is what I see as being important for an elementary library website:

• easy access to library OPAC and online subscription resources
• tabs for the different classes as a place to organize online resources specific to that class
• tabs for general websites that would be useful or fun for students
• tabs for tutorials to help students with their research on, for example: citing sources, creative commons
• attractive, uncluttered front page
• visible area for current events/activities happening in the library

 In the discussion forum, I learned about these ideas:

• creating a  parents' corner in the library website as a way to bring them into the library via resources they might use.
• adding links to online databases subscribed to by the school district to the Destiny homepage. I want to find out how to do this!

I developed a library website for my school last year. I went with the Blogger platform, because I wanted to post on a regular basis on what was happening in the library. Unfortunately, I have not posted regularly enough, but I plan on changing this. It is my goal to post once a week on my library website/blog. I felt that it was a very worthwhile endeavour to create the library website because it is a place that students can find the resources we are using for specific projects. I have also found some fun websites for the students and I know that they access these sites through the library website. Here is my library website.