GEN: Non-Media Centers

[Hildegard Pleva <HPleva@AOL.COM>]

The subject of this inquiry must have many puzzled. My question is for those
who are now working in a school library which is not a media center or have
had experience in one in the past. By non-media center I mean a school
library which includes only print media, with no control over films, videos,
CDs, etc.

This is my situation: It seems that when films and film strips arrived on the
scene in ancient times wither the librarians in my district were not
interested or the male powers that were in charge could not imagine that
females could take care of projectors etc. A separate audio-visual department
was created - a male kingdom. It is headquartered in our high school with
small collections of AV materials in each school. There are onyl 3 schools in
the district. As a result AV materials are not fully catalogued and certainly
do not appear in any card catalogue. Of course, we are not automated.

Each school has a part-time AV clerk and (you guessed it) she is also a
part-time library clerk, studyhall supervisor etc.

This long-standing arrangement has served to set a president separating
technology from the library. As a result our library has two out dated
computers and no CD-Rom research sources available for students although a
number of these are available in two fully-"technologized" sixth grade
classrooms.

Last year the five-year district technology plan which provided for
networking and library automation among other things was scrapped in favor of
a state-fundable technology initiative which will put mionitors in every
classroom with dial-up capability for video and, I believe, computer
resources although this is very foggy. There are still no plans that any of
the librarians know for annotated catalogue of the resources which will be
available through this system.

Frankly, I am getting tired of keeping up on technology which is continually
eluding my grasp. I could never get on the technology committee. Then it was
disbanded because of the new plan. I an persona non grata to the head of this
deal because I asked uncomfortable questions about the whole system.

Now that I have bored you with my situation, here are my questions. Have any
of you experience a similar situation? Have any of you been able to move a
non-media center into the information age? How did you do it? Do any of you
have any words of wisdom to share? How can I manage to influence change when
a peer's job as AV head is at stake?

I am very pro-active - successful in getting major increases for our book
budgets, send annual reports to super and board, monthly reports to principal
with whom I have been able to be very frank about the very odd and
counter-productive nature of this arrangement, put out library bulletins,
etc. In my five years here I have increased teacher use, student attendance
and circulation. What else can I do?

Remaining somewhat anonymous,           Hildegard    (hpleva@aol.com)