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Colleagues,
There's been some talk in my school district recently about extending
some of the services of the town's public library to (at least) our
secondary schools' libraries. Specifically, there have apparently been
discussions about enabling our students to search the public library's
holdings and check stuff out from school which would then be delivered
by courier.
Of course, hearing about this second hand inspires all kinds of
imaginings, heavenly and hellish alike, about how such a system might be
implemented and play out.
Our secondary librarians have decided to try and jump into these nascent
discussions so that we can see a few feet past our own windshields in
terms of steering the our respective services. We'll be meeting in a
couple weeks and I hope to bring in representative from the Public
library as well.
In order to be best prepared, I'd like to ask any of you who collaborate
with a public library in the fashion I've outlined, or in similar ways,
to tell me everything you can about the day-to-day mechanics of the
relationship. Do you share catalog and circ systems, for instance,
running identical software--or even sharing a server? Do your patrons
get aggregated results that include your public library's holdings when
they search your catalog? If so, can they easily choose to search only
local holdings? Do any of you share resources through mixed platforms
and circ systems using Z39.50 protocol or other means?
What about squabbles over turf, duties or materials? Are there any
problematic elements to joining forces? Do personnel ever do battle over
who is responsible for lost materials, for instance? I wanna hear about
it!
I guess it's only fair to state my perspective at this time: I'm happy
about the prospect of sharing but slightly worried about other things; I
want the benefits of teaming up but worry about becoming conjoined to a
debilitating degree. I hope, for instance, that I can maintain my own
catalog records for my materials and continue to tweak them for the kids
I serve. Moreover, I'd really like to continue administering our catalog
and circ system locally instead of merging all our data. I was briefly
employed in a district where the public library administered the catalog
and it was a bit of a nightmare. This was nearly fifteen years ago
and--believe it or not--since the public library opened later than the
school library, we actually had to wait for them to boot up the system
each morning! The search results also appeared as in lump with no option
available for limiting the results to the holdings of a single facility.
Students would constantly get frustrated trying to find stuff not
locally available.
I hope to hear from some of you that the situation has improved. If not,
though--share!
Gratefully,
Jeffrey Hastings,
School Library Media Specialist
Highlander Way Middle School
Howell, Michigan 48843
P.S. If you have a lot to talk about regarding this topic and would
rather chat, just send me your contacts and I'll give you a call.
http://www.idiotica.com/cranium/librarysite/content/library.html
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