The changing face of the library

The traditional view of the library, and the librarian's role, is beginning to undergo a radical shift with the many digital opportunities available to 21st century library users. With the help of library-change advocates such as Joyce Valenza, Diane Oberg, Ross Todd, Marlene Asselin and Ray Dorion to name but a few, librarians are beginning to emerge in a different role than before. With the increase of literature, such as can be found in School Libraries Worldwide, school librarians are encouraged to analyze and reevaluate their learning and thinking about what a school library is and find ways to facilitate the learning of school library users, which includes both educators and students.

This week's discussion topic revolves around Valenza's Manifesto for 21st Century School Librarian and articles found in School Libraries Worldwide Volume 14 all of which provided a lot of food for thought. To begin, Valenza's inspiring and enthusiastic presentation was an eye-opener for me and although I am not yet in a library setting, her manifesto forced me to look at how many of her points I could check off as a classroom teacher, and how many of these points I still need to work on. However, her manifesto is not the only one out there; I also found A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto to be equally thought provoking.

Valenza's Manifesto works together with Asselin & Doiron's article, as well as Todd's article in that they challenge librarians to "rethink the school library as a knowledge commons that both intersects with and bridges the digital and print terrain, and provides the intellectual tools across these multiple environments to foster creativity, to enable young people to develop their own personal knowledge and understanding of the curriculum, the world and themselves, to interpret and apply knowledge they interact with, and to foster the intellectual, social and cultural growth of our young people in a 24/7 time-space environment" (Todd, 2008). Asselin and Doiron reiterate the fact that many educators are not prepared to deal with the reality that many of today's students learn differently due to their daily exposure to the digital world, and as a result, we must change our teaching styles to take what students already know, and find ways to connect this in a meaningful way to what they need to know. They refer to literacies for the information generation and argue that these are necessary for learners to be able to "participate in the global networked society" (2008). Two of these that I have been working on with my students are critical literacies and ethics and social responsibility, and I was happy to see that McPherson's article expanded on these literacies. In fact, his article is very useful in that it links to specific lesson plans to teach these literacies, and after having checked out a few, I can see using them with my high school students.

Sanford's article about video games in the library is another article which challenges most people's thinking about school libraries. This article gave me a lot to think about because I am not a "gamer" nor do I really understand why so many people like to play them. Having said that, I have not even tried to play a video game since PacMan and Donkey Kong were popular when I was a teen (Okay - I realize that maybe I need to check the newer games out one day). This article was of particular interest, because this year our school library has decided to allow gaming. Initially, there were only certain computers designated for this activity which was only permitted before school and at lunchtime; however, it seems that now any available computer can be used for this. The problem that has arisen is that there are many students who would like to use the library lab to complete class assignments, but many of these students cannot find an available computer, and they are too timid to ask someone to stop playing an intense game in which the gamer might be at a critical point. As a classroom teacher, I am repeatedly hearing complaints about this. As important as it is to realize that video games allow for new types of learning, we also need to consider the other learners who frequent the library.

Finally, the last three articles that I looked at, but only briefly, were Naslund and Giustini's, Kopak's, and Friese's. I didn't spend a lot of time with these articles because Naslund and Giustini's was like a very brief overview of EDES 501. In fact, if I would have read this article in August, I would have at least had an idea about some of the topics that we were going to cover. I think that this article would be a great professional development topic for all educators to look at, but for the sake of this post, in particular librarians. It is brief enough that it would give them an idea of what each web 2.0 application is about, and then perhaps at follow up meetings a different tool could be investigated. It would be my hope that those who are remotely interested would go away with the article in hand and pursue their own investigations.

Kopak's article was interesting, but I found directed more at college and university level students. The idea of Open Access journals is a good one, but when I checked out some of the articles that are located in the included links, they were much too upper-level for my high school students. This will certainly change as this becomes a more accepted idea, and I can see its benefits for the 21st century library. Further to this, Friese's article was difficult for me to connect with because I am not yet in the library dealing with collection issues. Not only that, but I really am on the periphery of pop-culture. My students always have a good laugh when I ask them about certain aspects of popular culture that they feel I really should know.

Finally, after having spent some time listening to Valenza's podcast, reading the articles in School Libraries Worldwide and checking out some of the video links, it seems obvious to me that the school library is undergoing a great change. It is my hope that the librarians of the 20th century embrace these changes and as a result become those 21st century librarians who follow Valenza's Manifesto. The 21st century library needs to become the "libratory" that Valenza speaks of, where students are encouraged to explore the endless learning possibilities. And who knows, maybe the new libratory will have cookies and milk for the 21st century "cookie monsters", or a Starbucks outlet as so many of the students wished for in the Interviews with Young People video.