[LM_NET] New H.S Library

[Paul Trotta <trottap@ECHS.COM>]

Six years ago, after taking early retirement for the public school,  I
was hired to renovate this library.    We made one critical decision
that I have not regretted and that was to decrease the shelving in order
to create more for computers.    We  reduced the number of books in the
collection
from 11,000 to around 8 and have 26 computers for student use-all are
online with Office and our catalog.   We discarded many well-selected
but unread books and retained many standard titles that were also
unread.

Our students do at least 95 per cent of their research online and turn
to books only if require to have print resources for a research paper.
In many, many cases the actual content of their paper has been done
online and they select a book only to meet teacher requirement.    The
one area where this is not true is literary criticism.     Print
resources are still very much needed even though our online resources
are excellent.

If you are able I would recommend decreasing the book collection and
adding as many computer stations as you can.   We have one lab and could
easily use two.

Rather than buying a starter collection, I would also use this
opportunity to introduce collection mapping.   Tell the department heads
and teachers you will be happy to add titles correlated to the
curriculum and their planned use.

Good Luck!


Paul Trotta
Director of Library Media Services
East Catholic High School
Manchester, Ct
trottap@echs.com

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