GENERAL: Librarians helped create the cyber-Frankenstein that now threatens.

[Noe Torres <noetorres@YAHOO.COM>]

Colleagues:

I remember us working so hard in the late 80s and
early 90s to usher the age of electronic information
into our school librarians.  We stood on the bleeding
edge and showed everyone who would listen how to log
into a Unix shell and how to gopher and telnet.
Electronic information, we thought, was going to
vastly expand the horizons for school libraries
throughout the land.

And then our creation stood up amid the crashing
thunder and, not so subtly, made a grab for our
throats....

We have lost our way, and the very technologies for
which we pushed so hard have been used as an excuse to
downsize and even eliminate library resources and
library staffing throughout the nation.  Millions of
dollars that might otherwise have gone to bolster
school libraries and literacy have been wasted on
computers dumped on the schools with no clear
instructional purpose.  To add injury to insult, the
time and effort of many school librarians is
increasingly split between "traditional" library
duties and campus technology support.

"Our schools face serious problems," author Cliff
Stoll wrote in his book SILICON SNAKE OIL, "Computers
address none of these problems.  They're expensive,
quickly become obsolete, and drain scarce capital
resources.  Yet school administrators want them
desperately.  What's wrong with this picture?"

I can only shake my head and read books like Stoll's
over and over in an effort to figure out what exactly
happened.  The teachers who in the 80s came to the
library and had their students copy stuff
word-for-word out of print encyclopedias are now
having students print out stuff from online
encyclopedias.  What have we gained?

Few practitioners took notice, I think, back in 1995
when Stoll wrote, "What is most at risk from wide-area
networks?  Our library system."

Morning has broken and we're finally waking up to what
Stoll and others were saying.  After explaining why
online information is a poor substitute for real
libraries and real librarians, Stoll said in his book,
"...I suspect computers will deviously chew away at
libraries from the inside.  They'll eat up book
budgets and require librarians that are more
comfortable with computers than with children....
Libraries will become adept at supplying the public
with fast, low-quality information.  The result won't
be a library without books -- it'll be a library
without value."

I've been lately hoping that the days of strong school
libraries have not passed us by, and that something
will happen to turn things around.  I think what truly
has passed us by are the days when librarians could be
timid and assume that the importance of libraries was
a univeral truth.  "It's time for librarians to fight
back," wrote Gary Hartzell in his School Library
Journal article "The Invisible School Librarian: Why
Other Educators Are Blind to Your Value"
(http://www.slj.com/articles/19971101_5664.asp).

Hartzell wrote: "The way to fight back is to make the
role and contributions of school librarians visible to
those people who have the power to make a difference.
This is realistic, but it's in your hands.  You have
to write and present, you have to work to change the
culture of library service, and you have to direct
your organizations to look outward as well as inward.
It would be both ironic and tragic if school library
information centers fail the schools and the students
they serve because administrators didn't have any
information about them."

The time has definitely come when we as school
librarians need to venture out of our comfort zones
and be vocal about what we do, why computers cannot
take the place of libraries, why librarians must serve
as important instructional leaders in the schools, and
why libraries must remain integral to education.

My hope is that recent trends will be enough to awaken
another sleeping giant - the highly-educated,
highly-skilled, caring and compassionate school
library professional who is so very often given such a
small part to play in the important symphony of
education.





=====
\\____/===\____//   Noe Torres, Librarian
     --0\ /0--       McAllen ISD - McAllen, Texas
        (@)          noetorres@yahoo.com
                     http://www.mcallenisd.org/mchi/

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