…is currently winging its way across the Tasman into New Zealand schools for the first time ever! Those of you in Australian schools should also be receiving their free print copy shortly, if you haven’t already.
This term’s edition has a reprint of our favourite Quentin Blake poster, ‘The rights of the reader’ for you to pull out and display, and our feature article is by Doug Johnson, Director of media and technology at Mankato, Minnesota Public Schools in the United States, on the need for libraries to respond to the needs of what he refers to as a post-literate society. How libraries can best support the needs of their users whilst simultaneously responding to current changes in technology is a highly topical, occasionally polarising subject at present, and we’d be very interested to hear some comments from schools on Doug’s article.
We also have a really inspiring article, After school in the library media centre by Bob Hassett, head librarian at Luther Jackson Middle School, also in the States, about how he and his library team have fostered local support to implement and maintain an after-school Gamer’s club in their school library, and some of the positive flow-on effects this ‘un-traditional’ activity has had for both the library and the students.
With the next release of the SCIS Authority files due to be released in March this year we also have the latest changes to the SCIS Subject Headings. This quarter we have made changes to the reference structure of a number of existing headings, and we have implemented a number of new subject headings in response to requests by schools. A brief summary of these is included in Connections, or for more information, see our detailed list. If you would like to suggest a new subject heading, or a change to an existing subject heading, please contact us here at SCIS with your suggestion.
Please remember also that the full text of this and past issues of Connections (back to 2006) are freely available online at:
http://www2.curriculum.edu.au/connections/latest_issue.html
The image above is from flickr creative commons, and can be viewed at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/egfocus/ / CC BY 2.0
