On Tuesday 4 December 2012 SCIS conducted a consultation workshop with SCIS partners discussing future priorities in our support for school libraries.
Judy O’Connell, Course Director (Teacher Librarianship) at Charles Sturt University started the day with a set of challenges that covered collections, search, cataloguing, curriculum, interoperability and access. Her presentation Strategic directions for school libraries reinforced the context within which education libraries need to work. These included curriculum, the cloud and game-based learning in a library environment which is both physical and virtual.
The challenge to participants was to rethink library catalogues, which should no longer be seen as simply tools for locating records. Interrogation of data from different data pools requires new thinking and a new user focus. We need to change our technology interface to provide a natural, predictive and responsive search capacity. Web 3.0 challenges us to make library search into a discovery interface.
“How does search impact the way students think, and the way we organise information access?”
Judy pointed out that the search experience influences how students see information structure. Students conceptualise information and the search environment differently, and the way they search should influence the way that we organise information. The learning technologies environment has changed since library management systems were first designed, and we must not lose sight of what is happening in other areas of information retrieval. The importance of metadata developments, including Resource Description and Access (RDA), mean we cannot take old thinking into new information environments.
Check out Judy’s presentation, and then contribute to the ongoing discussion about how SCIS and library system providers can best serve school libraries in 2015 and beyond?
