[LM_NET] GEN: Praise for School Librarians from an Academic Librarian

[Christopher Harris <christophergharris@GMAIL.COM>]

With full disclosure as being the person who coordinated this, I did want to
share this blog post from Michelle Boule, a librarian at the University of
Houston. She recently finished facilitating a six week online course for
school librarians around Rochester, NY. Here is part of what she learned
from her time working with us:

"This experience has led me to realize that, of all the librarians in the
United States, school librarians get the shortest, saddest,
under-appreciated end of the stick. They have more hurdles to overcome than
any of us. No one has room to complain compared to them.

The thing that shocked me the most was their lack of access to technology.
These wonderful people we were expecting to teach our children about
information can not even access the information themselves. The system is
broken almost beyond repair." -
http://wanderingeyre.com/2007/12/19/school-librarians-are-heroes/
Our challenge, I firmly believe, is to take praise like this and become even
better by showing the rest of the library world how we take that short end
of the stick and use it to excel; how we continue to rise above the
challenges to find solutions instead of getting stuck on problems.

I was very proud to have played a very small part in helping make this class
a success. We will be releasing the course content as well as the whole
course website package as open source in the next few weeks. You can also
browse through the course and see what the participating librarians created
by going to http://sls.gvboces.org/sixweeks.


Christopher Harris - infomancy@gmail.com
Coordinator, School Library System
Genesee Valley BOCES - Le Roy, NY
VOTE FOR CHRIS - ALA COUNCIL 2008

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